The Blue Review Vol. 1 No. 2

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Volume I Number II

JUNE 1913

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JUNE CONTENTS

Page
Joachim Among the Sheepcotes By S. Spencer Frontispiece

Yasmin By James Elroy Flecker 77

The End of the Lonely King By Norman Boothroyd 78
Lines Spoken at the Opening of the Birmingham Repertory

Theatre By John Drinkwater 79

Millie By Katherine Mansfield 82

Anger and Dismay By J. D. Beresford 88

A Fresh Start in Music By E. J. Dent 97

Epilogue ; II. By Katherine Mansfield 103

CHRONICLES OF THE MONTH

The Theatre :

Caps, Bells and Legs By Gilbert Cannan no

Theatres in the Air By John Drinkwater 113

Poetry By Lascelles Abercrombie 117

The Novels By Hugh Walpole 123

General Literature By Frank Swinnerton 128

French Books :

A Classical Revival By John Middleton Murry 134

Recent French Novels By X. Marcel Boulestin 138

Music By W. Denis Browne 141

The Galleries :

Mr. Max Beerbohm's Exhibition By Edward Marsh 143
Independants and the Cubist Muddle By O. Raymond

Drey 146

Drawings by G. S. Lightfoot, J. D. Innes and Frances

Jennings

Editor : John Middleton Murry
Associate Editor : Katherine Mansfield
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ii

Joachim Among the Sheepcotes

By S. Spencer

YASMIN

A Ghazel

How splendid in the morning glows the lily : with what grace he

throws
His supplication to the rose : do roses nod the head, Yasmin ?

But when the silver dove descends I find the little flower of friends
Whose very name that sweetly ends I say when I have said —
Yasmin.

The morning light is clear and cold : I dare not in that light

behold
A whiter light, a deeper gold, a glory too far shed, Yasmin.

But when the deep red eye of day is level with the lone highway,
And some to Mecca turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin,

Or when the wind beneath the moon is drifting like a soul aswoon,
And harping planets talk love's tune with milky wings outspread,
Yasmin,

Shower down thy love, O burning bright ! For one night or the

other night
Will come the Gardener in white ; and gathered flowers are dead,

Yasmin.

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

THE END OF THE LONELY KING

They brought him down from Kharmadin
Beyond the narrow mountain pass

That leads again to Murias —
All pale, and worn, and deadly thin,
And covered with sweet-scented grass,

Upon a lordly palanquin.

They set him on the silver bed —
(The silver bed that seemed so small

Among the pillars of the Hall).
No sound was heard : no word was said,
As secretly they worked the pall

With shining moons of silken thread.

The hours dragged heavy in their flight,
Yet none paid heed unto the King ;

There seemed no air of sorrowing
As in the feeble candle-light
They toiled at their embroidering

With eager hands throughout the night.

They shed no tear : they prayed no prayer,
Nor gave the King a benison ;

But when at last the pall was done,
They covered him with heedless air
All silently ; then, one by one,

Crept out, and left him lying there . . .

NORMAN BOOTHROYD

78

LINES SPOKEN AT THE OPENING OF THE BIRMING-
HAM REPERTORY THEATRE, FEBRUARY 15th, 1913.

To you good ease, and grace to love us well :

To us good ease, and grace some tale to tell

Worthy your love. We stand with one consent

To plead anew a holy argument —

For art is holy. We, to whom there falls

The charge that men may see within these walls

The comely chronicle of comely plays,

You, who shall quicken us with blame or praise,

Desire alike but this, that here shall spring

Such issue of our labour as may bring

Fresh laurels to the altars that have known

Service of men whose passion might atone

For worlds than this more faithless, men whose names

Are very life — aye, swift and urgent flames

Of living are they. These are over us

To lighten all our travel : Aeschylus,

Euripides, the Sophoclean song,

And Aristophanes who captured wrong

In nets of laughter, lords of the Attic stage,

The fourfold Greek dominion ; and the age

Of nameless poets when the hope began

To quicken from the blood of Everyman

Into the splendour of Marlowe's kingly lust

Of kingly life, the glory that thieves nor rust

Can ever spoil, whose name is manifold —

Ford, Massinger, Dekker, Webster aureoled

With light of hell made holy, Middleton,

Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, aye, and one

Whom even these the lords of beauty's passion

Might crown for beauty's high imperial fashion

In classic calm of intellectual rule,

Ben Jonson. Sirs, I am nor wit nor fool

To speak in praise of him whose name is praise,

79

The Blue Review

Whose word is on the forehead of the days,
Shakespeare, our master tried and proved how well,
Mortality's immortal chronicle.

Under the warrant of these men we sail,

And theirs whose later labour these might hail,

Congreve and Otway : the Good-Natured Man,

Proud tattered Oliver : Dick Sheridan,

Who played at passion but free-born of wit

Put scandal out to school and laughed at it ;

These few that stand between the golden age

When poets made a marvel of the stage

And — do we dare to dream it r — an age that stirred

But yesterday, whereof the dawning word,—

Spoken when Ibsen spake, and here re-set

To many tunes on lips untutored yet

For speech Olympian, albeit pure of will, —

Shall ripen into witness that we still

Are countrymen of those glad poets dead ;

The seed is sown, the barren days are sped.

And they who sowed, are sowing ? He, beguiled
By who shall say what envious madness, Wilde,
Misfortune's moth and laughter's new wing-feather,
Remembering now no black despiteful weather :
Hankin, and he, the cleanser of our day,
Whose art is both a Preface and a Play,
And he who pities, as poets have pitied, life
Of Justice reft, so driven and torn in Strife,
And one who cries in Waste some news of man,
And one who finds in the bruised hearts of Nan
And Potnpey tragic and old yet timeless things :
And that dead Playboy, and his peer who sings
Yet of Cuchulain by the western sea —

80

Opening of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre

Of these is sown the seed that yet shall be
A heavy-waggoned harvest, masters mine,
Gathered by men whom now the immoderate wine
Of song is making ready.

In these walls
Look not for that light trickery that falls
To death at birth, wrought piecemeal at the will
Of apes who seek to ply their mimic skill :
Here shall the player work as work he may,
Yet shall he work in service of the play.
Nor shall you here find pitiful release
From life's large pressure, nay, but new increase
Of life made urgent by these master-men
Who are our captains. Life, and life again —
Tragic or brave, free-witted, gentle, signed
Of beauty's passion or the adventurous mind,
Or light as orchard blossom, motley wear
But life's wear always — that shall be our care
And all shall surely follow. What may be
Hereafter— to the heavens, to us to see
No will transgressing on the poet's wish,
To you to judge the meat before the dish.
May you that watch and we that serve so grow
In wisdom as adventuring we go
That some unwavering light from us may shine.
We have the challenge of the mighty line —
God grant us grace to give the countersign.

JOHN DRINKWATER

MILLIE By KATHERINE MANSFIELD

MILLIE stood leaning against the verandah until
the men were out of sight. When they were far down
the road Willie Cox turned round on his horse and
waved. But she didn't wave back. She nodded her
head a little and made a grimace. Not a bad young
fellow, Willie Cox, but a bit too free and easy for
her taste. Oh, my word ! it was hot. Enough to fry your hair !
Millie put her handkerchief over her head and shaded her eyes
with her hand. In the distance along the dusty road she could see
the horses — like brown spots dancing up and down, and when she
looked away from them and over the burnt paddocks she could see
them still — just before her eyes, jumping like mosquitoes. It was
half-past two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue
sky like a burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue
mountains quivered and leapt like sea. Sid wouldn't be back until
half-past ten. He had ridden over to the township with four of the
boys to help hunt down the young fellow who'd murdered Mr.
Williamson. Such a dreadful thing ! And Mrs. Williamson left all
alone with all those kids. Funny ! she couldn't think of Mr.
Williamson being dead ! He was such a one for a joke. Always
having a lark. Willie Cox said they found him in the barn, shot
bang through the head, and the young English " johnny " who'd
Deen on the station learning farming — disappeared. Funny ! she
wouldn't think of anyone shooting Mr. Williamson, and him so
popular and all. My word ! when they caught that young man !
Well — you couldn't be sorry for a young fellow like that. As Sid
said, if he wasn't strung up where would they all be ? A man like
that doesn't stop at one go. There was blood all over the barn.
And Willie Cox said he was that knocked out he picked a cigarette up
out of the blood and smoked it. My word ! he must have been
half dotty.

Millie went back into the kitchen. She put some ashes on
the stove and sprinkled them with water. Languidly, the sweat
pouring down her face, and dropping off her nose and chin, she

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Millie

cleared away the dinner, and going into the bedroom, stared at
herself in the fly-specked mirror, and wiped her face and neck
with a towel. She didn't know what was the matter with herself
that afternoon. She could have had a good cry— just for nothing —
and then change her blouse and have a good cup of tea. Yes, she
felt like that ! She flopped down on the side of the bed and stared
at the coloured print on the wall opposite, " Garden Party at
Windsor Castle." In the foreground emerald lawns planted with
immense oak trees, and in their grateful shade, a muddle of ladies
and gentlemen and parasols and little tables. The background
was filled with the towers of Windsor Castle, flying three Union
Jacks, and in the middle of the picture the old Queen, like a tea
cosy with a head on top of it. " I wonder if it really looked like
that." Millie stared at the flowery ladies, who simpered back at her.
" I wouldn't care for that sort of thing. Too much side. What
with the Queen an' one thing an' another." Over the packing case
dressing-table there was a large photograph of her and Sid, taken
on their wedding day. Nice picture that — if you do like. She was
sitting down in a basket chair, in her cream cashmere and satin
ribbons, and Sid, standing with one hand on her shoulder, looking
at her bouquet. And behind them there were some fern trees, and
a waterfall, and Mount Cook in the distance, covered with snow.
She had almost forgotten her wedding day ; time did pass so, and
if you hadn't any one to talk things over with, they soon dropped
out of your mind, " I wunner why we never had no kids . . ."
She shrugged her shoulders — gave it up. (( Well, I've never missed
them. I wouldn't be surprised if Sid had, though. He's softer than
me."

And then she sat, quiet, thinking of nothing at all, her red
swollen hands rolled in her apron, her feet stuck out in front of
her, her little head with the thick screw of dark hair, drooped on
her chest. " Tick-tick " went the kitchen clock, the ashes clinked
in the grate, and the Venetian blind knocked against the kitchen
window. Quite suddenly Millie felt frightened. A queer trembling

The Blue Review

started inside her— -in her stomach — and then spread all over
to her knees and hands. " There's somebody about," She tiptoed
to the door and peered into the kitchen. Nobody there ; the
verandah doors were closed, the blinds were down, and in the
dusky light the white face of the clock shone, and the furniture
seemed to bulge and breathe . . . and listen, too. The clock —
the ashes — and the Venetian — and then again—something else —
like steps in the back yard. " Go an' see what it is, Milly Evans."
She darted to the back door, opened it, and at the same moment
some one ducked behind the wood pile. " Who's that," she cried,
in a loud, bold voice. u Come out o' that, I seen yer. I know where
you are. I got my gun. Come out from behind of that wood stack."
She was not frightened any more. She was furiously angry. Her
heart banged like a drum. " I'll teach you to play tricks with a
woman," she yelled, and she took a gun from the kitchen corner,
and dashed down the verandah steps, across the glaring yard to
the other side of the wood stack. A young man lay there, on his
stomach, one arm across his face. " Get up ! You're shamming ! "
Still holding the gun she kicked him in the shoulders. He gave
no sign. <( Oh, my God, I believe he's dead." She knelt down,
seized hold of him, and turned him over on his back. He rolled
like a sack. She crouched back on her haunches, staring, her lips
and nostrils fluttered with horror.

He was not much more than a boy, with fair hair, and a
growth of fair down on his lips and chin. His eyes were open,
rolled up, showing the whites, and his face was patched
with dust caked with sweat. He wore a cotton shirt and
trousers with sandshoes on his feet. One of the trousers stuck
to his leg with a patch of dark blood. " I can't" said Millie,
and then, " You've got to." She bent over and felt his heart.
" Wait a minute," she stammered, " wait a minute," and she ran
into the house for brandy and a pail of water. " What are you going
to do, Millie Evans ? Oh, I don't know. I never seen anyone in a
dead faint before." She knelt down, put her arm under the boy's

84

Millie

head and poured some brandy between his lips. It spilled down
both sides of his mouth. She dipped a corner of her apron in the
water and wiped his face, and his hair and his throat, with fingers
that trembled. Under the dust and sweat his face gleamed, white as
her apron, and thin, and puckered in little lines. A strange dreadful
feeling gripped Millie Evans' bosom— some seed that had never
flourished there, unfolded, and struck deep roots and burst into
painful leaf. " Are yer coming round ? Feeling all right again ? "
The boy breathed sharply, half choked, his eyelids quivered, and
he moved his head from side to side. " You're better," said Millie,
smoothing his hair. " Feeling fine now again, ain't you ? " The pain
in her bosom half suffocated her. *' It's no good you crying,
Millie Evans. You got to keep your head." Quite suddenly he sat
up and leaned against the wood pile, away from her, staring on
the ground. " There now ! " cried Millie Evans, in a strange,
shaking voice. The boy turned and looked at her, still not speaking,
but his eyes were so full of pain and terror that she had to shut
her teeth and clench her hand to stop from crying. After a long
pause he said in the little voice of a child talking in his sleep,
" I'm hungry." His lips quivered. She scrambled to her feet and
stood over him. " You come right into the house and have a set
down meal," she said. " Can you walk r " " Yes,' he whispered,
and swaying he followed her across the glaring yard to the verandah.
At the bottom step he paused, looking at her again. " I'm not
coming in," he said. He sat on the verandah step in the little pool
of shade that lay round the house, Millie watched him. " When
did yer last 'ave anythink to eat ? " He shook his head. She cut a
chunk off the greasy corned beef and a round of bread plastered
with butter ; but when she brought it he was standing up, glancing
round him, and paid no attention to the plate of food. M When
are they coming back ? " he stammered.

At that moment she knew. She stood, holding the plate,
staring. He was Harrison. He was the English johnny who'd
killed Mr, Williamson, " I know who you are," she said,

85

The Blue Review

very slowly, " yer can't fox me. That's who you are. I must
have been blind in me two eyes not to 'ave known from the
first." He made a movement with his hands as though that
was all nothing. " When are they coming back ? " And she
meant to say, ■■■ Any minute. They're on their way now." Instead
she said to the dreadful, frightened face, " Not till 'arf past ten.'*
He sat down, leaning against one of the verandah poles. His face
broke up into little quivers. He shut his eyes and tears streamed
down his cheeks. " Nothing but a kid. An' all them fellows after
'im. 'E don't stand any more of a chance than a kid would."
" Try a bit of beef," said Millie. '■ It's the food you want. Some-
think to steady your stomach," She moved across the verandah
and sat down beside him, the plate on her knees. " 'Ere— try a bit."
She broke the bread and butter into little pieces, and she thought,
" They won't ketch 'im. Not if I can 'elp it. Men is all beasts.
I don' care wot 'e's done, or wot 'e 'asn't done. See 'im through,
Millie Evans. 'E's nothink but a sick kid."

Millie lay on her back, her eyes wide open, listening. Sid turned
over, hunched the quilt round his shoulders, muttered " Good
night, ole girl." She heard Willie Cox and the other chap drop
their clothes on to the kitchen floor, and then their voices, and
Willie Cox saying, " ;Lie down, Gumboil. Lie down, yer little
devil," to his dog. The house dropped quiet. She lay and listened.
Little pulses tapped in her body, listening, too. It was hot. She
was frightened to move because of Sid. " 'E must get off. *E must.
I don' care anythink about justice an' all the rot they've bin spout-
ing to-night," she thought, savagely. <f 'Ow are yer to know what
anythink's like till yer do know. It's all rot." She strained to the
silence. He ought to be moving. . . . Before there was a sound
from outside Willie Cox's Gumboil got up and padded sharply
across the kitchen floor and sniffed at the back door. Terror
started up in Millie. " What's that dog doing ? Uh ! What a fool
that young fellow is with a dog 'anging about. Why don't 'e lie

86

Millie

down an* sleep.'* The dog stopped, but she knew it was listening.
Suddenly, with a sound that made her cry out in horror the dog
started barking and rushing to and fro. " What's that ? What's up ? "
Sid flung out of bed. " It ain't nothink. It's only Gumboil. Sid,
Sid." She clutched his arm, but he shook her off. " My Christ,
there's somethink up. My God." Sid flung into his trousers.
Willie Cox opened the back door. Gumboil in a fury darted out
into the yard, round the corner of the house. " Sid, there's some
one in the paddock," roared the other chap. " What's it— what's
that ? " Sid dashed out on to the front verandah. " Here, Millie,
take the lantin. Willie, some skunk's got 'old of one of the 'orses."
The three men bolted out of the house and at the same moment
Millie saw Harrison dash across the paddock on Sid's horse and
down the road. " Millie, bring that blasted lantin." She ran in
her bare feet, her nightdress flicking her legs. They were after
him in a flash. And at the sight of Harrison in the distance, and
the three men hot after, a strange mad joy smothered everything
else. She rushed into the road — she laughed and shrieked and
danced in the dust, jigging the lantern. " A— ah ! Arter 'im, Sid !
A— a— a— h ! ketch 'im, Willie. Go it ! Go it ! A— ah, Sid !
Shoot 'im down. Shoot 'im ! "

8?

ANGER AND DISMAY

A Footnote on the Writings of H. G. Wells By J. D. Beresford

MR. WILLIAM WATSON believes in Dickens but
not in the future of the novel ; he has credited the
former and discredited the latter quite explicitly in
that new collection of his " The Muse in Exile."
Dickens is presented as a fighter, and the nature of
his belligerency is formulated in the couplet : " He
did not fight to rend the world apart, He fought to make it one
in mind and heart." I suppose the same thing might be said — by
himself, at least — of any propagandist whose temperament was
too mild to face the alternative of the sword. We see the magni-
ficent excuse of the Church " militant," that description which
was once so perfectly justified, but has no application to the
incredibly padded gloves of the modern ring. The truth is that
Mr. Watson's statement is absurd, a mere sentimental trifling
with ideas. If I fight my enemy I have one of two objects in view ;
either I desire to silence any further expression of his for ever, or
I desire to convince him that I am the better man and that he
had better not contradict me in future. I am not fool enough to
suppose, however, that my thrashing of him will make him one
with me in mind and heart. I know perfectly well that his object
was the same as mine, and that if I had been beaten, I might have
knuckled under, but I should not have adopted his accursed heresy
in the secret places of my mind.

The whole fallacy arises from the sentimentalisation of the word
" fight." Dickens was no fighter himself, and he could not portray
the fighter. His ideal was the sweet-tempered, flabby propagandist,
whose weapon was the model of his own virtuous life. Dickens's
only notion of a hypocrite was of one who covered a secret vice by a
profession of virtue and humility. When he attempted to draw a real
fighter, he always assumed that the person was mad.

Let us descend, for a moment, to a consideration of that
maligned and temperamental woman, Mr. F.'s aunt. I confess with
joy that I share her contempt for the precocious, do-my-little-best

88

Anger and Dismay

spirit of Clennam. I, too, hate a fool, and envy that wonderful
old lady's honesty in openly proclaiming the fact to the fool himself.
I have often wondered whether Dickens had not once been con-
fronted by the original of Mr. F.'s aunt ; pelted, perhaps — I
sincerely hope so— with hard and well-aimed crusts of toast.
I can imagine how he would have resented the bold expression
and the militant act ; he who was so entirely incapable of running
amuck. Virtue, not aggression, was his specific, and his ideal of
virtue was mid -Victorian ; tainted with Samuelism. Was he not,
after all, a Smiles of genius ? It is an amazing thought that all the
great mid- Victorian figures in poetry and fiction were born during
that extraordinary period of revolt which lasted from 1780 to 1830,
and that they lived through the wonderful year of 1848 without
learning a single lesson. . . .

Is it that we may perceive here some formulation of the law of
reaction, of the great and increasing beat of the pendulum with its
long swing from century to century ? . . .

Whatever the cosmic rule which shall account for the alter-
nation, I turn with relief to the contemplation of the real fighting
spirit. I was born to witness the opening movement of the diastole :
and I have been so far affected by the impetus of my own times
that no philosophic reflection will allay the irritation I feel when I
consider the ideal of placid acceptance, of resignation, of pleni-
tudinous satisfaction. It all appears so stagnant, so circumscribed ;
involuted in fold after fold of snug complacency.

Nevertheless in my youth my revolutionary spirit found little
material to work upon. I was the son of middle-aged parents; I was
hedged about by the old conventions, and I had not the wit or the
originality to find a ladder or to tear a hole in the fence. The
escalade, indeed, was not rapid when it came at last. My ladder
had many rungs, and — to come after so long an introduction to
the particulars of my present purpose — I willingly acknowledge
that more than one rungwas made negotiable for me by the writings
of Mr. H. G. Wells.

89

The Blue Review

The first of his books which nudged my attention was " The
Wheels of Chance." From one point of view, it has little bearing
on the subject of this paper. It is touched by the Smiles tradition,
Hoopdriver's potentialities are those of the old disciple ; the best
we can expect from him is application to study, he is an indeter-
minate dreamer with no capacity for *iconoclasm. The same thing
may be said of his expansion, Arthur Kipps. Both are studies of
that undeveloped man who once appeared to their creator as him-
self — himself at sixteen or so. We find a little passion in these
two quite lovable little men, but it is only a weak explosion of
hesitating temper.

With " The Invisible Man," however, we have a clear sight
of the true Berserker. Griffin comes before us a complete antithesis
to the Kipps type— the union is a later development. Griffin is a
selfish anarchist. Wrapped in that cloak of invisibility which was
to serve him, he hoped, so much better than the wo If -shape of
the Norse legends, he is bent on self- aggrandisement. As he
develops, the lust of killing grows upon him, he is one against
humanity and he dies fighting the world, his hands clenched, his
eyes wide open, and his expression one of " anger and dismay."
And always as I read that last wonderful account of his career,
I forgive him for his obsession with self, for his pig-headedness
and his ultimate futility. The form of him returns to visibility in
my imagination as it returned to the sight of that little foolish
crowd about him, glowing with those two fundamental emotions,
" anger and dismay," — the very elements of man's revolt against
imprisonment in the flesh. These are transcendental things ; and
they are for me in this connection the basis of study. I take them
naked and titanic as two essentials of the artist ; while I admit
— not without a faint regret— that they are not the only essentials,
and that they represent but two aspects, however well marked, in
my image of Mr. Wells — who, by the way, is quite unknown to me
except from his works. . . .

With the invisible man, megalomaniac that he was, anger took

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precedence, and only defeat and death could bring dismay. But
when the Berserker is transformed from beast to artist, it is dismay
which represents the generating emotion, and it seems to me that
it is of a type which is possible only to those who have the power
of withdrawal from their surroundings. This elemental dismay of
which I speak now, for instance, is of a type quite other to that
felt by the sentimental Charles Dickens. His preoccupation with
injustice of the Squeers pattern, had the peculiarly human quality
which comes from intimacy with the world of men. He battered—-
a little feebly perhaps-- at the heart of humanity, but always he
kissed the gods' feet.

Mr. Wells has had the power to stand aside from these pre-
occupations, and I quote a passage from " The War of the Worlds,"
which has always appeared to me as certainly representative of
phases of his own experience. <( At times," he writes, " I suffer
from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world
about me ; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress
and tragedy of it all."

The penalty imposed for the ecstasies of this abstraction, is a
return to dismay, and thence to anger— partly, maybe, at the cursed
spite which has saddled him with the recognition. The world of
those far imaginings is such a fine place, that the immediate pre-
sentation of the world as it appears, strikes the dreamer as a fierce
impossible horror. He sees all too clearly that he is imprisoned, and
if he were of the primitive Berserker type he would end in red rage,
amuck among the unspeakable futilities of our present life. But
the artist is confined by the necessities of his temperament, he is
conscious before all of the urge to create rather than to destroy.
In brief moments of madness he may flap his hands wildly and
cry out, " Oh ! let us do something, for Heaven's sake, do some-
thing to alter all this " ; but presently the old command will
compel him once more, and he will settle down with little spurts
of passion and impatience, either to create a picture of the thing

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he desires, or to display his own vision of the repulsive thing
which the mass of mankind accepts as the best of all possible worlds .
It is these spurts of passion and impatience, symptoms of the
transcendental dismay and anger of the spirit, that have evoked
this tentative analysis. I find them mirrored in the persons of Mr.
Wells's stories : in Lewisham's attack upon the sheep-faced
Parkson ; in Graham , the sleeper, when he is in the " Silent
Rooms " ; in the time-traveller when " he raved to and fro,
screaming and crying upon God and Fate " ; in Bedford (another
Berserker) blindly killing the Selemites ; in Capes smashing glass
in his preparation room ; in George Ponderevo and Remington,
though somewhat more restrained ; in other characters too nu-
merous to instance ; and finally with a growing difference in
Trafford. I have picked out my examples haphazard as they have
occurred to me, but I believe that there is hardly a novel or a
romance by Mr. Wells in which the signs of this primitive anger
cannot be discerned, while I cannot recall (to mark my early
antithesis) a single true instance of the same passion in all the
novels of Dickens — the nearest approach to it is in the portrait of
Mr. F.'s aunt. . . .

I am laying stress on this contrast not because I wish in any way
to belittle the genius of Dickens — for whose work I have a great
admiration— but because I wish to thrust a particular distinction
into prominence. It may seem that I have indicated the distinction
as that between the fighting and the merely propagandist spirit,
but the thing goes deeper than this. As I see it, indeed, it is a
difference between two fundamental attitudes of mind, between
the spirits of acceptance and rejection, between worshipping,
idealising the past and glorying in the possibilities of the future.

Mr. Wells, if my induction is a true one, has little or no respect
for the past. His war is not against individuals but against con-
ventions. He comes out of the transcendental, a bright unpreju-
diced spirit aghast at the dull prejudices of our civilisation. He
sees our futility, our indolence of mind, our blind leaning upon

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tradition, and it may be that his first impulse was to explain in a
few clear sentences the mistakes under which we are labouring,
to make one definite statement so incredibly convincing that the
world would at once recognise its stupidity.

That impulse, indeed, is the primitive urge of genius. The
remedy proposed is of less importance than the great desire to
reconstruct. It was in this that Nietzsche was magnificent ; while
his disciples (including Strindberg) have failed, in as far as they
have adopted only the critical premises and neglected the con-
structive deduction.

But neither Mr. Wells nor any other prophet, however inspired,
can build until he has persuaded mankind to clear the site, and in
the present case I see a life work devoted to that magnificent task.
His methods may be divided broadly into two categories : a
criticism of the present building and an exhibition of the new
elevations.

The first category must be subdivided. Under one head falls
all that is merely analysis of existing conditions, all that critical
attack which admits the stereotyped response, " Have you anything
better to offer ? " Under the other with which alone I propose to
deal, our civilisation is shown by romantic means to be ephemeral.
The assault is shifted from the convention to the individual. The
endeavour represents the attempt to persuade complacent, bigoted,
unthinking man that his civilisation is impermanent, to lift him
momentarily from his contemplation of his surroundings and give
him wider vision.

Many of Mr. Wells's romances fulfil this purpose. As I think of
that list of books, I remember first how they gave me the delight
of living in a changed world, and secondly how they led me to
understand that all life, as I knew it, was open to criticism; that it
was a phase in evolution, and not, as I had once believed, essential,
ordained and static. Those books (I may instance more particularly
the " Food of the Gods," " The War of the Worlds," *' The First
Men in the Moon," " The War in the Air," and certain shorter

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stories, lifted me from my contemplation of my immediate sur-
roundings. While I read I gloried in the freedom of moving in
new worlds. This uplifting was due to my author's gift of presen-
tation, and if the effect produced had been no other than this, I
must have written down these romances as a failure. If,for instance,
Mr. Wells's romances had been of the same quality as those of
Jules Verne — to whom he has been so foolishly and purblindly
compared — I should have come back to earth unaltered. I should
have had the new experience of exploring air or water in an un-
known machine, but I should have had no new sight of the world
from the outside.

In the case of the five books I have mentioned, the effect upon
myself was permanent, I had been led to look down upon the whole
machinery of civilisation from outside. My habit of thought with
regard to life was broken. If I did not believe in the possibility of,
say, such a discovery as Herakleophorbia IV., I did very truly
believe henceforward in the essential instability of society.

(It may be remarked that I have omitted " The Time Machine,"
and " The Sleeper Awakes " from my list. I have done so because
these two books vary quite definitely in intention and method.
They do not break but develop ; they are in no real sense con-
structive. "The Sea Lady," " The Island of Dr. Moreau," and
" The Wonderful Visit," I have omitted for other reasons. They
are more nearly allegories of the older type, and while I do not
fail to perceive the essential allegory of " The Food of the Gods,"
the constructive intention of that work places it in the other cate-
gory. If Mr, Wells had written only the first five romances men-
tioned in this interpolation, he might with some slight show of
reasonableness have been likened to Jules Verne.)

I see that I have laid myself open to a charge of egotism in
thus laying stress upon the effect which these books have had
upon my own mind. But I have adopted the first person deliberately
because I have found that the majority of readers have read Mr.
Wells's romances as they might have read those of the ordinary

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author ; and so have come back to earth unchanged. And when
I consider this amazing blindness and engrossment in personal
affairs, I suffer a reflex of that primitive dismay and anger. I desire
fiercely to expound and am brought back to that realisation which
led me to this long parenthetical explanation, and examination of
categories.

For we are confronted with the extraordinary difficulty of
opening men's eyes, I have touched briefly on the method of the
first category, and the second I must dismiss briefly. This ex-
hibition of the new plans is to be found in such books as " The
Days of the Comet," and " A Modern Utopia," but it appears to
me that men will not seriously regard the new until they have
become dissatisfied with the old, and that they turn from these
pictures of a brighter future with the comment, " Very pretty,
no doubt, but we have to live in the world as it is."

I see that this imaginary remark directly contradicts the spirit
of that earlier reply I put into the mouth of mankind, namely,
" Have you anything better to offer ? " but the contradiction is
not mine. In my opinion mankind as a whole is as I have thus
drawn it. I find both remarks perfectly characteristic of the same
type. Both arise from a failure to look out, from the elementary
inability to withdraw momentarily from the immediate pressure
of life. . . .

So I return— perhaps by a personal example— to a defence of
that " anger and dismay " with which I began. I have heard these
fine passions criticised, and I am up in arms to exalt them. I am
willing to beg the question that they are effects and not causes, but
I find that that assumption in no way weakens my championship.
For I know nothing of prime causes, and I believe that admission
is implicit in all that I have written here, as I believe also that the
unthinking adoption of a cut and dried cosmogeny is responsible
for much of the blindness which Mr. Wells has so valiantly
attempted to cure.

AH that I have so feebly and curtly attempted to champion is

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the militant spirit that lies behind all that has been expressed by
these various books, combining so many methods, of Mr. Wells.
To me the purpose of them is not many but one. I am conscious
of man triumphant in thought, battering not altogether vainly at
the feet of the gods. I see man regarding the limitations of the
flesh with anger and dismay.

96

A FRESH START IN MUSIC By EDWARD J. DENT

MUSIC is in the melting-pot, we are told nowadays.
Was there ever a time when this could not be said ?
The great upheavals associated with the names of
Monteverdi or Wagner may be perhaps considered
to have been exceptional ; twenty years ago, say
both revolutionaries and reactionaries, there was
peace and tranquillity, steady progress and obedience to sound
tradition. Yet a reference to Dr. W. H, Hadow's " Studies in
Modern Music " (second series, 1895) will show us that in those
days it was necessary to make an elaborate apologia for the au-
dacities and originalities of Dvorak, a composer who appears now
to be remembered only by an occasional amateur performance of his
chamber- music. If we are conscious of a state of flux at this moment,
the cause is to be sought elsewhere. The real change that has taken
place in the last twenty years is the enormous development of
musical intelligence in this country. The general public is more
interested in music ; it is even beginning to be interested in its
young English composers. This interest has to some extent raised
the standard of their work. Twenty years ago the young English
composer was an obedient and industrious lad who thought it
the highest of compliments when his teacher in a moment of
cordiality said that his work quite suggested Parry or Stanford ;
and far away in the distant heavens shone the star Brahms, whom
all were told to worship, though none could ever hope to imitate
him. The young composer of to-day seems much more determined
to be himself and himself only : if he is told that his works have a
flavour of Vaughan Williams or Delins he feels quite rightly
that that is not what he is aiming at, however deeply he may
admire either musician. His teachers are consequently beginning
to find out that the old methods of teaching composition will not
last much longer, and the problem of finding new methods is an
extremely difficult one.

Teachers of composition tend to fall into two groups, which
we may call the academics and the modernists. The results of

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their instruction may be observed at any concert where our young
composers' works are performed. If we except the few who show
a really strong individuality of their own, the crowd of the second-
rate either goes on writing well-constructed sonatas and sym-
phonies of the Brahms period and even earlier, or it gives us
symphonic poems and " fantasies " which sound very modern
at first, but which after a few years time, if not sooner, are
seen to consist merely of a string of journalistic cliches borrowed
from the foreign composers in vogue at the moment.

It is the teachers of the second class who constitute the real
danger to our national music. The work of the second-rate aca-
demic is so dull that there is no risk of its having any influence
on the public, and the first-rate pupil of an " academic " school
is probably the better, if he is a real genius, for the careful training.
As long as pupils are taught to think logically in terms of music,
they are safe, and to grasp even the externals of academic sonata-
form requires a certain amount of musical reasoning. The modern-
ist does not teach his pupils to think in sounds. Sonata-form,
he says, is obsolete, and he may very well be quite right on this
point. But has he any constructive principle to put in the place
of it ? If one can judge by such results as come to a hearing, he
apparently has not. The general rule given to the young composer
seems to be that he must let the shape of his work be determined
merely by the story chosen for illustration, and that logic may
take care of itself, as long as the orchestration is effective, that is,
as long as the orchestral effects sound sufficiently like those which
have been made familiar to the writers by Strauss, Debussy or
Stravinsky.

The tendency of the age, we are told, is towards orchestral
music. Pure line, say the modern critics, has had its day, and the
future is to express itself mainly in terms of colour. For the further
elaboration of this thesis the word " Post-Impressionism " will
be found very useful. Having no knowledge whatever of the
art of painting, I must apologise for being compelled to restrict

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myself to the technicalities of music. Helmholtz adopted the word
Klangfarbe — tone-colour — as a German equivalent of timbre —
quality of tone ; but I see no reason to suppose that the function
of "tone-colour " in music is therefore identical with that of colour
in painting. The survival of the word chromatic is proof that
musicians of an earlier age had completely different views on the
question.

We must not be misled by false analogies and picturesque
phrases. When critics tell us that modern music depends mainly
on colour, they simply mean that they themselves are satisfied
with music that presents certain varieties of quality of tone,
obtained either by combinations of orchestral instruments, or
possibly even by combinations of notes sounded simultaneously
on one instrument. The rapid complication of the mechanical
resources by which music is made audible has in fact dazzled many
people so completely as to make them forget the absence of that
logical sense of continuity of thought which is the only foundation
of true music.

This tyranny of the instrument forms the subject of an in-
teresting paper by Ferruccio Busoni in a recent number of the
German weekly, Marz. The article bears the title Neuer Anfang,
" a fresh start." If a young composer writes as he feels, his teacher
will be sure to tell him that he does not know-how to write for the
instruments. " Look at the scores of W T agner or Strauss," he will
say, " and learn from them how to score effectively." The result,
says Busoni, is that every modern orchestral work presents us
with the same complex of sounds— the violoncellos always trem-
bling with exuberance of emotion, the horns making the most of
their natural hesitance of attack, the hautboys always breathless
and embarrassed, the clarinets always ostentatious of their voluble
facility. There is no room for originality of thought, it is crowded
out by the necessity of conforming to the conventional modern
technique. Beethoven, almost alone among modern composers,
ignored the requirements of the instruments, and made them play

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what he wished. Poor old Beethoven ! say the teachers of composi-
tion ; he was deaf and had no idea of orchestration.

" The born creator of the future," continues Busoni, " will first
of all have to face the responsibility of setting himself free from
all that he has learnt at school, all that he has heard at concerts,
all that is reputed to be " musical " ; and when he has cleared
his mind of all that is unnecessary, he will have to bring himself
into a state of ascetic and devout concentration, which will enable
him to listen to the secret voice within him, and ultimately to
arrive at the further stage of communicating this message to
mankind."

All this is perhaps less revolutionary than it appears at first
sight. We are to give up considering the technique of instruments,
and cimply write abstract music, indifferent to the means employed
for translating the signs into sounds. Beethoven's posthumous
quartets, I imagine, show some sort of attempt to work on the lines
indicated. But the Giotto of the musical renaissance, as Busoni
calls him, will have to be a very much greater man than even
Beethoven, and we may be pretty certain that his contemporaries
will have a proportionately greater difficulty in understanding him.
In the meanwhile, what can we ordinary mortals do towards
turning Busoni's advice to some sort of account ? It is useless to
set about finding a Giotto, but we can at least try to prepare the
way for him. The main thing is that we should concentrate our
attention on thinking musically, or grasping the principles of
musical logic. We must learn to insist on truth and sincerity in the
works which are put before us, we must learn to refuse all that is
merely formal and traditional, all that dreary waste of artificial
art which charitable critics describe as *' very musical " — the sad
equivalent of what in literature is classed as " scholarly verse,"
This does not mean that we must burn all our classics, still less
that we should throw in our lot with the party of programme-
music. It is the writers of programme-music, more than any others,
who have fallen victims to the tyranny of the instruments. Let us

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learn all we can from the classics, let us love them if we will, but
let us beware of reverencing them. Moreover, if we are going to
study the classics, let us study them widely (not confining our
attention solely to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms), and study thera
always with a critical eye, never accepting any work as great
merely because it bears the name of a great man.

In the case of composers, a good case may be made out for a
more restricted investigation of the music of the past. Verdi
advised his pupils to take no notice whatever of modern music.
They were to work hard at fugue- writing, probably in a rather
severe style, and to study no classics apparently, except Palestrina
and Marcello, the latter as being the best possible model for the
declamation of the Italian language. The selection of these two
composers (the English reader may substitute Byrd and Purcell
if he likes) shows us that Verdi realised the same essential point
which underlies Busoni's counsels of apparent anarchy. We can
perfectly well afford to make a bonfire of all our instruments, for
the best of all instruments will still be left to us—the human voice.

Even if we keep our instruments, it is undoubtedly on singing
that all musical education must be based, whether for the ordinary
amateur or for the Beethoven of the future. No one can enter fully
into the understanding of music unless he can feel every musical
idea from the point of view of the man who first conceived it and
used his voice to express it. The experience of controlling our lungs
and vocal cords is the best possible training, if rightly planned, for
the perception of the rhythmical continuity of sound which is
the basis of music. Voices have their limitations, we are told ; but
have we considered what we might have achieved had we from
the days of Jubal devoted as much physical labour to singing as we
have done to playing instruments, and as much intellectual energy
as has gone to the development of speech ? All instrumental music >
except in so far as it is derived from the primitive tom-tom, is
originally an imitation of singing, and it is barely two hundred
years since the artistic supremacy of the voice began to be con-

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tested. It is the last hundred years that has brought about the
disastrous virtuosity of the orchestra, the perfection of instru-
mental mechanism which has made the instruments less human
and personal in their expression in proportion as they have
become more elaborate in their technique. The primitive hautboy,
for instance, was the nearest approach that its maker could con-
trive towards an imitation of the human voice ; the modern haut-
boy claims a separate individuality, and has stultified its improve-
ment in fluency and in accuracy of intonation by an exaggeration
of its characteristic deficiencies. Music has to be written for it
which will draw attention to its being a hautboy and not any other
instrument, and in this way the situation has gradually arisen
that it is the over-development of mechanical facilities which is
blocking the composer's way to real originality. For the present,
it is probably in the sphere of chamber-music that we may hope
for some attempt to make real progress. The stringed instruments
are less tyrannical, they approach more nearly to the ideal of a
normal type of musical sound which can be utilised (as Beethoven
showed) for almost any idea which the composer wishes to express.
The string quartet is almost the only form of music that has had
an absolutely continuous history for two hundred years. Debussy
and Ravel have found it as satisfactory a medium as Scarlatti
for the expression of pure musical thought. It is often said that
modern conditions are not favourable to its development ; but
the fact remains that the most modern composers, even if they
employ the form but rarely, do at least continue to make use of it,
and that section of the public which is seriously interested in
music continues, though in small numbers, to listen to them. Until
we have recovered the use of our own voices, it seems that it is
from writers of quartets that we may most reasonably expect
new departures — departures that are really new, and that will
lead along a road from which there need be no turning back.

1 02

EPILOGUE : IE By KATHERINE MANSFIELD

" / met a young virgin
Who sadly did moan , . ."

THERE is a very unctuous and irritating English proverb
to the effect that " Every cloud has a silver lining."
What comfort can it be to one steeped to the eyebrows
in clouds to ponder over their linings, and what an un-
pleasant picture-postcard seal it sets upon one's tragedy
— turning it into a little ha'penny monstrosity with a
moon in the left-hand corner like a vainglorious threepenny bit !
Nevertheless, like most unctuous and irritating things, it is true.
The lining woke me after my first night at the Pension Seguin
and showed me over the feather bolster a room as bright with
sunlight, as if every golden-haired baby in Heaven were pelting
the earth with buttercup posies. " What a charming fancy ! " I
thought. " How much prettier than the proverb. It sounds like a
day in the country with Katherine Tynan.' . . . And I saw a
little picture of myself and Katherine Tynan being handed glasses
of milk by a red-faced woman with an immensely fat apron, while
we discussed the direct truth of proverbs as opposed to the
fallacy of playful babies. But in such a case imaginary I was ranged
on the side of the proverbs. (< There's a lot of sound sense in 'era,"
said that coarse being. " I admire the way they put their collective
foot down upon the female attempt to embroider everything.
' The pitcher goes to the well till it breaks.' Also gut. Not even
a loophole for a set of verses to a broken pitcher. No possible
chance of the well being one of those symbolic founts to which
all hearts in the forms of pitchers are carried. The only proverb
I disapprove of," went on this impossible creature, pulling a spring
onion from the garden bed and chewing on it, " is the one about a
bird in the hand. I naturally prefer birds in bushes." " But,"
said Katherine Tynan, tender and brooding, as she lifted a little
green fly from her milk glass. " But if you were Saint Francis, the
bird would not mind being in your hand. It would prefer the white
nest of your fingers to any bush." ... I jumped out of bed and

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ran over to the window and opened it wide and leaned out. Down
below in the avenue a wind shook and swung the trees ; the scent
of leaves was on the lifting air. The houses lining the avenue were
small and white. Charming, chaste looking little houses, showing
glimpses of lace and knots of ribbon, for all the world like country
children in a row, about to play " Nuts and May." I began to
imagine an adorable little creature named Yvette who lived in one
and all of these houses. . . . She spends her morning in a white
lace boudoir cap, worked with daisies, sipping chocolate from a
Sevres cup with one hand, while a faithful attendant polishes the
little pink nails of the other. She spends the afternoon in her tiny
white and gold boudoir, curled up, a Persian kitten on her lap,
while her ardent, beautiful lover leans over the back of the sofa,
kissing and kissing again that thrice fascinating dimple on her left
shoulder. . . . when one of the balcony windows opened, and a
stout servant swaggered out with her arms full of rugs and carpet
strips. With a gesture expressing fury and disgust she flung them
over the railing, disappeared, reappeared again with a long-handled
cane broom and fell upon the wretched rugs and carpets. Bang !
Whack ! Whack ! Bang ! Their feeble, pitiful jigging inflamed her
to ever greater effort. Clouds of dust flew up round her, and when
one little rug escaped and flopped down to the avenue below, like a
fish, she leaned over the balcony, shaking her fist and the broom at it.
Lured by the noise, an old gentleman came to a window op-
posite and cast an eye of approval upon the industrious girl and
yawned in the face of the lovely day. There was an air of detach-
ment and deliberation about the way he carefully felt over the
muscles of his arms and legs, pressed his throat, coughed, and
shot a jet of spittle out of the window. Nobody seemed more sur-
prised at this last feat than he. He seemed to regard it as a small
triumph in its way, buttoning his immense stomach into a white
pique waistcoat with every appearance of satisfaction. Away flew
my charming Yvette in a black and white check dress, an alpaca
apron, and a market basket over her arm,

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I dressed, ate a roll and drank some tepid coffee, feeling very
sobered. I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful
place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was
that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men
should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly
or otherwise, and countrysides, which are always heavenly. With
these reflections, both pious and smug, I put on my hat, groped
my way along the dark passage and ran down the five flights of
stairs into the Rue St. Leger. There was a garden on the opposite
side of the street, through which one walked to the University
and the more pretentious avenues fronting the Place du Theatre.
Although autumn was well advanced, not a leaf had fallen from
the trees, the little shrubs and bushes were touched with pink and
crimson, and against the blue sky the trees stood sheathed in gold.
On stone benches nursemaids in white cloaks and stiff white caps
chattered and wagged their heads like a company of cockatoos, and,
up and down, in the sun, some genteel babies bowled hoops with a
delicate air. What peculiar pleasure it is to wander through a strange
city and amuse oneself as a child does, playing a solitary game.

" Pardon, Madame, mais voulez-vous "... and then the
voice faltered and cried my name as though I had been given up
for lost times without number ; as though I had been drowned in
foreign seas, and burnt in American hotel fires, and buried in a
hundred lonely graves. " What on earth are you doing here ? "
Before me, not a day changed, not a hairpin altered, stood Violet
Burton. I was flattered beyond measure at this enthusiasm, and
pressed her cold, strong hand, and said " Extraordinary ! "

" But what are you here for ? "

"... nerves."

" Oh, impossible, I really can't believe that."

" It is perfectly true," I said, my enthusiasm waning. There is
nothing more annoying to a woman than to be suspected of nerves
of iron.

" Well, you certainly don't look it," said she, scrutinising me

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with that direct English frankness that makes one feel as though
sitting in the glare of a window at breakfast-time.

" What are you here for," I said, smiling graciously to soften
the glare. At that she turned and looked across the lawns, and
fidgetted with her umbrella like a provincial actress about to
make a confession. " I "—in a quiet affected voice — " I came here
to forget. , . . But," facing me again, and smiling energetically,
" don't let's talk about that. Not yet. I can't explain. Not until
I know you all over again." Very solemnly — <( not until I am sure
you are to be trusted."

" Oh, don't trust me, Violet," I cried. " I'm not to be trusted.
I wouldn't if I were you." She frowned and stared.

" What a terrible thing to say. You can't be in earnest."

" Yes, I am. There's nothing I adore talking about so much as
another person's secret. " To my surprise, she came to my side
and put her arm through mine.

" Thank you," she said, gratefully. u I think it's awfully good
of you to take me into your confidence like that. Awfully. And
even if it were true . . . but no, it can't be true, otherwise you
wouldn't have told me. I mean it can't be psychologically true of
the same nature to be frank and dishonourable at the same time.
Can it ? But then ... I don't know. I suppose it is possible.
Don't you find that the Russian novelists have made an upheaval
of all your conclusions ? " We walked, bras dessus bras dessons,
down the sunny path.

" Let's sit down," said Violet. " There's a fountain quite near
this bench. I often come here. You can hear it all the time." The
faint noise of the water sounded like a half-forgotten tune, half sly,
half laughing.

*' Isn't it wonderful," breathed Violet. " Like weeping in the
night."

" Oh Violet," said I, terrified at this turn. " Wonderful things
don't weep in the night. They sleep like tops and ' know nothing
more till again it is day.' "

1 06

Epilogue : II.

She put her arm over the back of the bench and crossed her legs.

" Why do you persist in denying your emotions ? Why are you
ashamed of them ? " she demanded,

"I'm not. But I keep them tucked away, and only produce them
very occasionally, like special little pots of jam, when the people
whom I love come to tea."

" There you are again ! Emotions and jam ! Now, I'm
absolutely different. I live on mine. Sometimes I wish I didn't —
but then again I would rather suffer through them — suffer in-
tensely, I mean ; go down into the depths with them, for the sake
of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness."
She edged nearer to me.

" I wish I could think where I get my nature from," she said.
" Father and Mother are absolutely different. I mean— they're
quite normal — quite commonplace." I shook my head and raised
my eyebrows. " But it is no use fighting it. It has beaten me.
Absolutely — once and for all." A pause, inadequately filled by
the sly, laughing water. " Now," said Violet, impressively, " you
know what I meant when I said I came here to forget."

" But I assure you I don't, Violet. How can you expect me to
be so subtle ? I quite understand that you don't wish to tell me
until you know me better. Quite !

She opened her eyes and her mouth.

" I have told you ! I mean — not straight out. Not in so many
words. But then — how could I ? But when I told you of my
emotional nature, and that I had been in the depths and swept
up to the pinnacles . . . surely, surely you realised that I was
telling you, symbolically. What else can you have thought ? "

No young girl ever performs such gymnastic feats by herself.
Yet in my experience I had always imagined that the depths
followed the pinnacles. I ventured to suggest so.

" They do," said Violet gloomily. " You see them, if you look,
before and after."

M Like the people in Shelley's skylark," said I.

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Violet looked vague, and I repented. But I did not know how
to sympathise, and I had no idea of the relative sizes.

" It was in the summer," said Violet. " I had been most fright-
fully depressed. I don't know what it was. For one thing I felt as
though I could not make up my mind to anything. I felt so terribly
useless — that I had no place in the scheme of things — and worst
of all, nobody who understood me. ... It may have been what
I was reading at the time . . . but I don't think . . . not entirely.
5 till one never knows. Does one ? And then I met . . . Mr. Farr,
at a dance——"

" Oh, call him by his Christian name, Violet. You can't go on
telling me about Mr. Farr and you ... on the heights."

" Why on earth not ? Very well — I met — Arthur. I think I
must have been mad that evening. For one thing there had been a
bother about going. Mother didn't want me to, because she said
there wouldn't be anybody to see me home. And I was frightfully
keen. I must have had a presentiment, I think. Do you believe in
presentiments. ... I don't know, we can't be certain, can we ?
Anyhow, I went. And he was there." She turned a deep scarlet
and bit her lip. Oh, I really began to like Violet Burton — to like
her very much indeed.

" Go on," I said.

" We danced together seven times and we talked the whole
time. The music was very slow — we talked of everything. You
Joiow . . . about books and theatres and all that sort of thing at
first, and then — about our souls."

" . . . . What ? "

" I said— our souls. He understood me absolutely. And after
the seventh dance . . . No, I must tell you the first thing he
ever said to me. He said, ' Do you believe in Pan ? ' Quite quietly.
Just like that. And then he said, " I knew you did." Wasn't that
extra-or-dhvary ! After the seventh dance we sat out on the
landing. And . , . shall I go on ? "

"Yes, go on."

Epilogue : II.

" He said, ' I think I must be mad. I want to kiss you — and —
I let him."

" Do go on."

w I simply can't tell you what I felt like. Fancy ! I'd never
kissed out of the family before. I mean — of course — never a man.
And then he said : ' I must tell you — I am engaged.' "

" Well ? "

" What else is there ? Of course I simply rushed upstairs and
tumbled everything over in the dressing-room and found my coat
and went home. And next morning I made Mother let me come
here. I thought," said Violet, " I thought I would have died of
shame."

" Is that all ? " I cried. " You can't mean to say that's all ? "

" What else could there be ? What on earth did you expect.
How extraordinary you are — staring at me like that."

And in the long pause I heard again the little fountain, half
sly, half laughing — at me, I thought, not at Violet.

109

CHRONICLES OF THE MONTH

THE THEATRE By GILBERT CANNAN

Caps, Bells and Legs

IT is extraordinary how scattered are the impressions to be
got in the theatres of London — a good piece of acting here,
a colour there, a witticism or two in another place, a tune
in another. When you disentangle them you will find always
that each moment of pleasure came by accident and existed
entirely apart from the general intention. There is a comedy
at the Little Theatre by a new and rather skilful writer, a Mr.
Vansittart, who dons the cap and bells and jingles them for a
couple of hours, during which and to their accompaniment, a
comic drama ought to have started, reached its climax, and come
to a close. But, though there was a company of very competent
actors on the stage, nothing was heard but the accompaniment,
so that I was constantly reminded of an undergraduate neighbour
I once had who evolved an unvarying accompaniment of C, E
and G in waltz time for every tune that happened to stick in his
unmusical memory. Impossible when he played, to distinguish
anything but his thudding accompaniment, . , It may be said
that, as a critic, I have no business when witnessing a play to go
back over the years to undergraduate memories. In the theatre,
drama can hold my attention (and, I believe, everybody else's)
and I can think of nothing else when it is presented on the stage.
When it is absent, my faculties are not engaged, and any wandering
idea can creep into my head. (That this happens to other critics
is shown by the comptes rendus in the newspapers.) That Mr.
Vansittart's cap and bells played the old C, E and G refrain is
regrettable, but, having tested my power to respond to drama with
Hamlet at Drury Lane, I refuse to believe that the fault was more
mine than the author's. I wish him well, and pass on to record
other disappointments.

The new American Revue at the London Opera House has a
good illustrated-paper kind of poster of a Merveilleuse lady, which

no

A Composition

G. S. Lightfoot

Child

ren

Frances Jennings

gs

The Theatre

has only had an effect on me in one place. There is a certain wall
in a main thoroughfare which proved too small for its length.
The bill-sticker, concerned only to fulfil his functions, and caring
nothing for anatomy, has folded up the bottom third of the picture,
so that the lady's leg, attractively revealed by an aperture in her
gown, grows out of her waist. This fascinated me, and when I
saw the Revue I found that this poster gives a truer idea of the
performance than its more fortunate duplicates do. At the London
Opera House the ladies' legs do grow out of their waists, or, at
least, such is my impression. They have a great many legs, but
every attempt I made to count them was baffled, for they were
for ever on the run, running out of nothing into nothing, aimlessly,
without purpose, without humour, without zest. There was one
period when I thought I should achieve my reckoning, but suddenly
sixteen legs disappeared into a pool of water and I had to begin
again, and before that I had been put out by the entertainment
taking a sudden plunge into Max Reinhardt's Arabian Nights,
so that I was forced into a curious contemplation of two pairs of
male legs. Till then I had decided that the purpose of the enter-
tainment was to display a large selection of female legs, but vVhen
I was presented with these four — two white and two stained brown
— my ideas were upset and I was set wondering why four male
legs should be enough for the female public of London while
for the male public an unascertainable number should be necessary.
This problem is still unsolved, though it remains interesting.
There was no effective humour in the display, very little musical
ability, no romance, no intelligence, hardly any of the qualities
with which in musical comedy and English revues the appeal of
legs is salted. Here, bluntly (and most expensively) was the stage
used to satisfy that element in human nature upon which Mahom-
med founded a vision of Paradise. Less efficient than the One
Prophet, the Americans responsible for this " colossal success "
have bungled their use of their material and give the impression
that female legs grow out of the female waist. Perhaps my friend

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the bill-sticker had seen the show and had been horrified into an
access of honesty, for certainly his is the only poster that gives a
correct idea of the new Revue, and it remains its aptest criticism.

A wicked spirit of irreverence almost drives me to wish that
there were a few pairs of legs in Strife. Respect for the play and
its author however win the day. The back-cloth of the speech
scene in Strife is a picture of Welsh hills. These and the action
that takes place among them call back to the mind that there are
winds in the world, winds and foul weather and a hard living to be
gained, harsh facts from which our townish huddling away leads
us to take a dull delight in caps and bells and legs. To read the
word Strife and the name John Galsworthy in the list of plays
is to be braced to new hope. To attend the play is to have the
comforting assurance that here at least is one man in the theatre
who will not fawn upon his audience, or leer at it, or mewl at it,
or strut before it, but one who to the best of his ability will in
terms of the theatre set before his audience the facts that have
stirred his emotion and by his art lead them into sharing his
feeling, his desire, his warm perception of the forces that play
about and through human action. He is an upright man that will
not indulge in showman's tricks, nor mental tricks, nor make any
appeal save through his art and the legitimate use of the machinery
at his disposal. It is rather his sense of law and order than his
sense of justice that will not let him allow his conflicting forces
actually come to grips, and makes him state rather than reveal,
deal with types rather than characters. That must be granted him.
It is in his attitude, in his essence. What is so valuable is that within
its scope his art is admirably disciplined, economical and effective.
His is a stern wistfulness that is the most telling antidote to caps,
bells and legs. These also are good things, admirable in their place,
but, if they are not used in terms of the theatre they are as distaste-
ful as any other raw material, as distasteful as Mr. Galsworthy's
emotions would be, if he were ever slovenly enough to dump them
down on the stage, without moulding them into form. Really the

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Theatres in the Air

whole problem is resolved into a question of the right use and
the wrong use of the theatre. Caps, bells and legs are every bit
as good as wistful emotions if they are rightly used. The perform-
ance of Strife at the Comedy reveals an efficiency which is not to
be found at any other theatre, except, perhaps, on a lower level,
the Royalty. What a fortune that man will make who discovers
the right use of legs in the theatre ! Stravinsky and Fokin are
very near it.

THEATRES IN THE AIR By JOHN DRINKWATER

MR. GORDON CRAIG (" Towards a New Theatre," Dent,
2 is. net) has produced a beautiful book, and in that he justifies
himself. If we complain that it fails in its primary intention we
are ungracious, for the gift of a beautiful book can in no case be
just cause for complaint, no matter how capricious its service
may be. The imaginative reader of great dramatic literature is
accustomed to create ideal performances in his mind, a visionary
conduct of movement and conflict that is unimpeded by the
thousand embarrassing circumstances of the theatre— mechanical
difficulties and mishaps, the personality of the actor, the enormous
problem of investing the complicated and delicate piece of
machinery which is comprehensively called the stage with the
freedom and elasticity of art. And he will, too, often set this ideal
performance against an ideal background without consideration
of time and space — of the theatre's w T alls. This background Mr.
Craig does much to realise for us — on paper. These designs, with
their admirable economy of detail and their stirring suggestion of
height and distance cannot but leave our imagination the richer
and more apt for the creation of those performances that outrun
all the possibilities of theatrical device. Mr. Craig has dreamt well,
and for this we are grateful. It may be said here that his new book
is not greatly concerned with the opposition to words as the primary

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medium of drama that found an advocate in the author's " Art
of the Theatre," and there is no present necessity to dispute
Mr. Craig's denial of poetry on the stage. Many of these designs
are made for accepted masterpieces of poetic drama, and whatever
the designer's quarrel with the spoken word may be in general,
it is not laboured here. Nor are we disposed to pay very much
attention to the text of this present volume ; Mr. Craig is not a
good writer either in style or temperament. His prose is constantly
apeing the ease of the conversational stylists, and always failing to
catch their secret ; it is rather like Mr. Newman or Mr. Montague
on stilts, the fine lissomness of gait that is natural to them
turning to awkward condescension, as who should walk a little
way with Tom and Dick, poor fellows. There is, moreover,
scarcely anything in these notes that was very much worth saying
— rather an irritating wagging of the head with an " I could an
if I would.*' So that dismissing the book as telling us but little of
Mr. Craig's views of the whole art of the theatre and finding
annoyance rather than pleasure in his writing, we are left with
the bare designs themselves, which are indeed the sole— and
ample— -justification of the volume. We wish that they had been
published in a folio without any trappings, but since their maker
decided against this we are not disposed to quarrel unduly with
what we take to be an indiscretion. These designs are full of
imaginative beauty, and no one can look at them without realising
that Mr. Craig is one of the most gifted men of his time. He has,
as we have said, dreamt finely and cleanly ; the imagination is
never dissipated into mere fancy. But Mr. Craig calls his book
** Towards a New Theatre," and it is at this point that the real
trouble in his work begins.

A great play does not necessarily need the stage to prove its
greatness, but it is certain that the dramatist can only achieve
high mastery of construction by knowledge of, and in terms of, the
theatre. It is questionable whether, apart from this gain, the artist
can secure any profound and lasting pleasure from work in the

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Theatres in the Air

theatre, but, however this may be, every artist who has any
experience of such work knows that whatever the theatre may or
may not be, it cannot possibly be a place of dreams. Life in a theatre
is a life of continual conflict with immediate and practical difficul-
ties on the stage, a daily compromise of ideals with necessity, of
dreams with stubborn physical facts. The supreme virtue of the
theatre is that it is the one instrument by which it is possible to
make great art popular, and it is an understanding of this condition
that is drawing so much of our best work to-day into its service.
But the theatre is definitely a place in which to do and not to
dream. Mr. Craig gives us a design for the last scene of the first
act of Hamlet. It is extraordinarily impressive and really quickens
our perception of the poet's mood. At the back of the stage is the
figure of a man ; behind him rises a great square-cut block of
building ; measuring this from our figure we find it to be sixty
feet high, and the sky goes up above it. We do not see the full
breadth of the scene, but measuring that part which is visible by
the same standard we find it to be seventy-five feet — ninety feet
if we allow a small margin on either side. It is, as we say, un-
deniably impressive, but will Mr, Craig put it on a stage for us ?
We have another design : a dark flight of steps— thirty- five steps
as nearly as we can count them ; a foreground of perhaps ten feet.
On the steps is the figure of a woman, an isolated point of light
in the surrounding darkness. Mr. Craig sees much emotional value
in the design, and so do we ; will he put it on a stage for us ?
It does not help us to tell us that he is working towards a new
theatre and not the new theatre. The fact is that there is not the
remotest possibility of a theatre in which these designs could be
translated into terms of the actual stage. You cannot have sixty-
feet high buildings with the sky over them on the stage, and if you
could you would have a stage that would be useless for everything
but pantomime. And you cannot light a single figure without
lighting a surrounding space. At least, you cannot do these things
in the theatre that is already beginning to announce again that it

ir 5

The Blue Review

will have its own passionate and vigorous life, whatever might be
done in the theatre towards which Mr. Craig tells us he is pointing,
saying gaily that it is also a mountain. Of course many things might
be done in or on a mountain, but that is another matter. The young
theatre to-day is in fierce opposition to a misconceived and wholly
unpoetic principle of stage decoration. Mr. Craig, more perhaps
than any man living, might lead and inspirit it in a struggle that
means a good many bruises ; or he may quite justly absent himself
from the theatre altogether and continue to achieve admirable
designs which will feed the imagination but not the stage. If he is
to do us the former service he must show us how to work in cloth
and wood and limes and electric bulbs, remembering that the
people who are willing to have their imaginations stirred and to
pay for the adventure will not fill a mountain ; that the theatre,
in other words, insists before everything else that the artist shall
oppose himself to practical difficulties at every turn and that he
prove every dream upon the stage as he goes along. It is not sur-
prising that many artists, realising these severities of the theatre,
refuse to bow to a discipline so stern. If Mr. Craig confessed him-
self to be of these, nobody could blame him, and his art would
lose nothing. But it is useless to tell us that he is pointing the
way to achievements in the theatre which even he himself, by his
own witness, can yet do little more than see dimly in rapt ecstasy,
and at the same time ignore the perplexing but inflexible conditions
that the theatre imposes on its servants.

116

POETRY By LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE

" Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure."

IT is hard to keep clear of the critical King Cambyses' vein when
one has to write about Rabindra Nath Tagore's " Gitanjali "
(Macmillan 4s. 6d. net.). " Thou hast made me endless . , ./'
Yes, that is the danger. It is, I suppose, one of the paradoxes of
aesthetics, that poetry, when it achieves a perfect formality —
when form and impulse are inevitably related — has the power
of causing a notable sense of complete liberation from all the
formality of consciousness : " Thou hast made me endless."
Life can get nothing better than these moments ; they belong to
Dionysus. But they are " unexpressive." The making of great
poetry is a transformation of Dionysus into Apollo ; but the
reading of great poetry is a transformation of Apollo back into
Dionysus. And Dionysus untransformed is still less the god of
criticism than he is of poetry. He is, however, the god of King
Cambyses' vein, which, as a good European, I am bound to detest
above everything. As a precaution against him— to give him time
for settling down into the everyday formality of thought — I shall
speculate a little about the significance of " Gitanjali " outside of
art. For Tagore's work belongs to world-politics as well as to
poetry. As I read his own exquisite prose translation of his songs^
I seem to have jumped right over that formidable clash which is,
or ought to be, at the back of everybody's mind— the coming clash
of East and West ; I seem to have landed magically in its serene
and triumphant conclusion. All the great original civilisations of
the world (including the one on whose bequests we are still living)
have resulted from the East fusing somehow with the West.
And always it has been the East that supplied impulse — Dionysus,
the West that supplied form— Apollo ; for the resulting triumph
of vitality, each was as necessary as the other. Now this seems to
me exactly what has happened afresh in " Gitanjali." The book
is not only noble poetry ; it is a new civilisation. This is why it
is so incomprehensibly surprising. When one is talking of poetry,
Dionysus and Apollo will always come in very conveniently as

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figures of speech ; that is how I was using them just now. But in
* l Gitanjali " they have become gods once more. A profound im-
pulse from the East and a masterful formality from the West have
joined together to create a new perfection of conscious life.

This, at any rate, is how I read the book. And there seems no
doubt that it actually is a joint product of East and West. Rabindra
Nath Tagore 's family has long been conspicuous for its efforts to
Europeanise India, or Indianise Europe, whichever you prefer.
His father took a great part in establishing the Brahma Samaj,
an eclectic theistic religion which appears to have deliberately
attempted to compound the formal thought of the West with
Indian spiritual intuition, I believe it has had an immense influence.
But the real result of the Brahma Samaj is in the songs of Rabindra
Nath Tagore, which have penetrated the whole of Indian life.
I may be hunting a chimaera ; but really this seems to me extra-
ordinarily significant. Compare these songs with almost any other
Eastern poetry, and you will see what I mean. Eastern poetry,
however, means for most of us, I suppose, Fitzgerald's Omar ;
and the comparison here will not be so striking. For Fitzgerald
** tampered/' as they say, with his original : in fact, he turned it
into a European poem. Read a literal translation of Omar, and
you will see that Fitzgerald gave to his original just that which
is so noticeably supreme in " Gitanjali " : he gave it form. But
Hafiz will show how Tagore differs from typical Oriental lyrics.
No one can miss the puissance of impulse in Hafiz ; but I imagine
that most Europeans would agree that it is impossible to read
Hafiz with any comfort, not even in a reading that so admirably
suggests the external form as Walter Leaf's translation. What
disturbs us is the complete lack of internal form agreeing with the
external. Orientalists, of course, admit this ; they say Persian
poetry (and it is evidently true of Eastern poetry in general) gets
its unity and only professes to get it, from an extraordinarily strict
externality of form : the spirit within the poetry is " free." That
is merely to say, the spirit is shapeless ; and as long as Greece

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Poetry

lives in Europe, we are not likely to be satisfied with shapeless
spirit, however shapely the substance may be. A more familiar
instance, doubtless, would be the Canticles ; and their purport
is very close to that of " Gitanjali." The inspiration of the Canticles
is as sublime as anything in poetry ; but it is utterly shapeless.
It is ungoverned ; Dionysus has not contrived to turn into Apollo.

And that is just what he has contrived to do in " Gitanjali.'*
I certainly should not compare the inspiration of this book with
the depth and splendour of the inspiration of Hafiz or the Canticles .
It does not seem, like theirs, a rage from the very heart of life.
It is finer, more delicate, more wistful, decidedly less profound.
But all the same, compared with modern European poetry, it
amazingly seems to have behind it the pressure of vast reservoirs
of vitality. No doubt this comes from the immense force of Indian
religion. The thing is, however, that this elemental kind of in-
spiration has been mastered into complete formality as shapely and
exquisite as anything in the whole range of European lyric ; and,
I think, considering the facts of the milieu in which " Gitanjali "
originated, we may truly call this formality Western. But whether
this be so or not, it makes Tagore's poetry of the same nature as
the poetry of Sappho or Simonides, Wordsworth or Heine ; and
— here is the amazing thing — this without ceasing to be altogether
Oriental and Indian. The translation of " Gitanjali *' gives us, of
course, no notion of the external form of these songs ; but it must
certainly be something beautiful. Beauty of external form by no
means compels the spirit within to be shapely : it may easily be
" free," or shapeless. But *• soul is form and doth the body make " :
when the soul is form— when thought and mood have such
superb shapeliness as they have in " Gitanjali " — the body cannot
refuse obedience to it.

It is possible that the Brahma Samaj— and by that I mean the
" contamination " of East and West — may be responsible for
Tagore's noble mingling of mystical aspiration with a profound
and delighted acceptance of life. But probably this is simply the

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result of Tagore's genius ; for mysticism in Europe has always
been just as inclined to deny life as mysticism in the East. In any
case, the quality is one of the chief things in what Mr. Ransome
would call the " kinetic " of the book — in what it sets out to say.
But I shall not attempt the futility of describing what " Gitanjali "
is like. In the bounty and glow and simplicity of its imagery, it is
as if it discovers vitality itself. But it is more than a deep flux
of vitality ; it is vitality daring to hold itself in a supreme conscious-
ness. The forces of its inspiration have made themselves into
lucid formality, like the forces that build crystals ; and therefore
it is poetry that can as easily and as equally speak of strange and
remote experiences of the spirit as of the divine lusts of the senses.
Just because, I believe, it promises a new civilisation, but promises
it in the old way, in another fusion of the spiritual energy of the
East with the mental formality of the West— just because of this,
it is poetry which once more achieves the condition towards
which all poetry is for ever straining : it is a perfection of
conscious life.

Well, I hope I have avoided King Cambyses* vein ; I am not
quite sure. But I shall have no difficulty in keeping clear of it for
the rest of this article. Not that " Gitanjali," as an earnest of future
wonders, need make us desperate about the present. We are not
doing so badly ourselves ; after Tagore's Indian dream, we need
not cry to dream again. Indeed, if we had several books like Mr.
D. H, Lawrence's " Love-Poems " (Duckworth 4s. 6d. net), I
should certainly have to say that we are doing astonishingly
well. But, though Mr. Masefield's " Dauber " (Heinemann 3s. 6d.
net) has appeared in book form, Mr. Lawrence's poems stand
by themselves, among recent books, for justifiable daring.
" Dauber " seems to me the least successful of Mr. Masefield's
narratives ; chiefly because only a rattling good story could justify
a poem of such length, and the story is a very poor affair ; it is
false in psychology and false in sentiment. The hero's death ought
to have been significant ; but I cannot help suspecting that Mr.

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Poetry

Masefield, having turned his hero at last into a decent sort of chap,
killed him because he did not know what to do with him. Even
so, however, there are several pages of incomparable description,
and continual lightning flashes of splendid phrasing. But I do not
like having to praise Mr. Masefield only for the ornament of his
poetry. I cannot find much to say either about Mr. Hewlett's
" Helen Redeemed " (Macmillan 4s. 6d. net) or Mr. William
Watson's " The Muse in Exile." Since Mr. Hewlett published
4£ Artemision," his verse seems to have been trying hard to
recapture the qualities which enabled that delightful book to do
something considerable towards the poetic re-creation of Greek
legend. One cannot but admire the determined Hellenism of this
confirmed romantic. Only in one poem in this latest book of his—
in " Gnatho " — can I find anything comparable with the keen
phrasing and vivid conception of " Artemision." The rest is what
you might expect from the industry of a romantic trying to be a
Hellenist. Of Mr. Watson's " The Muse in Exile " (Jenkins 3s. 6d.
net) I will not say anything at all ; I have too much respect for
Mr. Watson's past. Miss Emilia Stuart Lo rimer's " Songs of
Alban " (Constable 3s. 6d, net) is another book I must pass by.
Her writing is evidently quite alive ; but I find it difficult to enjoy
poetry which I cannot understand ; and there is very little of Miss
Lorimer's which I can understand.

So I am left with Mr. Lawrence's " Love Poems." There is
novelty here ; but the right sort of novelty. It is poetry realising
things afresh. If u realist " were not a word abominably misused,
it would be the word for Mr. Lawrence's poems. I do not care
very much for his rhythms ; their daring seems to be really a fear
of being conventional, though sometimes, as when he uses mono-
syllabic feet, they are obviously effective :

" To ha'e gone an' given his white young flesh
To a woman that coarse."

And the love in his " Love Poems " is rather too monotonously

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the " bitter-sweet impracticable adder." But Mr. Lawrence has
an admirable power of liberating the concealed meaning of words,
and an equally admirable power of unexpected but truthful
association. These lines give an instance of both these qualities :

" a grey pale light like must
That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed
To flourish there, as pale mould blooms on a crust.'*

The choice of the word (£ flourish ■* marks Mr. Lawrence as a poet ;
and a sinister dawn is captured with curious assurance by the
suggestion, physical as well as emotional, of mould. Such detail
as this Mr. Lawrence uses for the patient, elaborate and extra-
ordinarily economical fixation of a sequence of moods which, for
all that they are somewhat monotonous, are so concentrated into
poetry that they are quite irresistible. But, remarkable as these
" love poems " are, Mr. Lawrence works with less effort, and to
clearer result, in the sharp psychology and vigorously restrained
word-play of the dialect poems at the end of his book.

122

THE NOVELS By HUGH WALPOLE

Imagination

THE use of the imagination has been complicated for the
modern novelist by the emphasis laid by the modern
critic upon the importance of recorded observation.
It was at one time demanded that Mr. Micawber and
Becky Sharp should not only have sharply denned
dwellings and properties of a very 7 recognisable kind,
but that they should also, of themselves, be individual and memor-
able characters . Now that background is of itself almost sufficient to
claim approving attention, and the fact that one can remember
the angles of the playground at one's board-school and the exact
appearance of the counter at the shop where one was once an eager
assistant is enough to catch the critics and readers by the throat.

Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett, who have, in their sharp
retention of experience, enough material to last them until the
end of their days, have nevertheless produced some of their most
remarkable work by the fine energy of their imagination ; the
deserted London in " The War of the Worlds " and the execution
in " The Old Wives' Tale " are as powerful and as true as the
experiences of Kipps or the aspirations of young Clayhanger.

The lesser novelist of to-day, however, betrays at every step
that his imagination is consciously fettered by the close proximity
of his public. Unless he is of the first rank, and artist enough to
give this same imagination precedence to this cherished public,
one success will kill his spontaneity, strangle his honesty, weaken
his individuality ; here in Mr. W. J. Locke's " Stella Maris "
(John Lane, 6s.) is pertinent and distressing evidence of this. There
are many who admired the books that Mr. Locke gave to the world
before " Marcus Ordeyne " as work of the very finest promise and
of considerable performance. " The Usurper," " Where Love Is,"
" The White Dove," these were individual, honest, admirable
studies in character. Yvonne in " Derelicts " and the Lanyons in
" The White Dove " are etchings of the most brilliant order.
With " Marcus Ordeyne " came popular success and, since

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then, so anxious has been Mr. Locke to give his public what they
wish him to give them, that spontaneity of imagination has been
utterly and recklessly abandoned. In " Stella Maris," the latest
and surely the worst of his novels, we can behold this shackled
imagination, struggling at first, ultimately defeated, imprisoned,
abandoned.

The idea of someone, living away from the world, innocent,
happy, ignorant, plunged then,, suddenly, into experience and
beaten to the ground with the shock of it, is, if not absolutely
new, packed with possibilities. I believe that, at the beginning,
Mr. Locke saw these possibilities, but saw also that an honest
development of them would have forbidden both that sentimental-
ity and that crudity that his public now expect from him. His
imagination protests. " Come," says Mr. Locke, " you've got to
do what I tell vou — no more nonsense." We have then a beautiful
girl with " a pair of frail arms, a daintily curved neck, a haunting
face, and a mass of dark hair encircling it on the pillow like a
nimbus," We have a strong rugged hero, a wonderful villainess,
thin-lipped and always dressed in black, a charity child, surely
related to Little Nell and Little Paul. The psychological interest
of the effect upon Stella of the revelation of a wicked (here a
purple) world is sunk beneath such sentences as " The cruel, vulgar
and hideous things of life were not the appanages of a class apart.
They entered into her own narrowed world. Her beautiful world 1
Her hateful, horrible terror of a world ! " or <( Stella rose, and
clasping hands to her bosom, went to him —

" ' Belovedest, for Christ's sake, what is the end of all this ? ■ "

The end of it all is, of course :

" He put his arm around her, and all his love spoke. ■ You.
The living mystery of beauty that is you.' He whispered into her
lips. ' You—Stella Maris— Star of the Sea ! ' "

There is no humour in this book.

If Mr. Locke has chained his Imagination for fear of the things
that it might do, Miss Mayer in " The Third Miss Symons "

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(Sidgwick, 3s. 6d. net) has discarded it altogether. Here I must
frankly admit that Mr. Masefield's eulogistic preface aroused too
eager an excitement. In this preface he says : '' The world is, of
course, the comparatively passive feminine world, but few modern
books (if any) have treated of that world so happily, with such
complete acceptance, unbiassed and unprejudiced, yet with such
selective tact and variety of gaiety." Remembering the work of
Mrs. Wharton, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Miss Sinclair, Miss
Cholmondeley, Miss Ethel Sidgwick and others, all of whom have
had for their stage this " comparatively passive feminine world,"
I was naturally determined to judge " The Third Miss Symons *"
by high standards. To these standards Miss Mayer's little book
does not begin to attain. Here is an accurate, well-written, grey,
narration of a melancholy spinster's passage through the world.
The observation is accurate, the atmosphere of heavy chandeliers,
mid-day Sunday beef, and grey gloves worn at the finger-tips,
most carefully maintained. Here is this material waiting for
Imagination to come and start it into flame. Imagination never
comes. The facts are there, the observation is accurate, and from
it all nothing is to be gathered, nothing carries, in its spontaneous
vitality, any relation to the other victories, the other tragedies
that life can show. No, observation is not enough.

Here, indeed, in another first novel, published in the same
month, is Mr. Masefield's too eager statement immediately contra-
dicted. Miss Ivy Low in " Growing Pains " (Heinemann, 6s.) has,
for her study, this same " passive feminine world " and in it she
does not entirely disregard the claims of Imagination, does
produce something that has life and colour somewhere at its heart.
It is in the earlier portion of her book that Miss Low is most
successful. Her nervous, self-centred morbid little girl, flying
from temper to affection, from bulls'-eyes (stolen out of a shop) to
religion, is most admirably described, and Miss Low does use her
imagination sufficiently to place this little girl in relation with all
the other things in a restless and agitated world. In the book there

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is poetry, too, and a very admirable humour. Miss Low has not,
as yet, learnt the lessons of construction and development, but
hers is the best first novel that the present year has yet produced.

Imagination, if it has not accompanied Miss Low quite far
enough, has yielded to Miss Ethel Sidgwick almost too bountifully.
In " Succession '* (Sidgwick and Jackson, 6s.), we are given the
long-expected sequel to " Promise " and are faced at the book's
close by the question as to why this world that Miss Sidgwick has
herself seen so vividly and given to us so bountifully, a world full
of pathos, humour, and excitement, is ultimately for us so difficult
of comprehension.

There is no doubt here of the fulness and vigour of Miss
Sidgwick's imagination nor of the freedom and authority that she
has given to it, so that she has simply followed and written as it
has commanded her. But Miss Sidgwick's book is difficult to read
because the author, in the desire to give her imagination its finest
freedom, has refused, when the career is run and the adventure
is concluded, any final and eliminating revision. There the plunder
that her excursion has provided for her is lying ; from this plunder
there should be selection, discipline, order. The story of the struggle
of the soul of a genius against physical weakness is fine, the crowd
of persons protecting, assaulting this genius, is admirably described
and illuminated. Only from the great mass of dialogue, from the
piling of minutiae upon minutiae, from the constant iteration of the
Parisian and Munich background, enough does not finally reward
the reader. The boy, his grandfather, his uncle, the composers,
the other musicians, his philistine father, are there and are truth-
fully there, but their capture has been difficult and even when
the tale is ended, the mists are still about them.

Mr. Beresford's " Goslings " (Heinemann, 6s.) on the other
hand, is almost too rigorously pruned, and this only because the
invention is so lively, the characters so admirably vital that every
reader will wish that the book had been twice as long. Here, truly,
is imagination rightly disciplined.

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The Novels

Mr. Beresford, in his story of a plague that swept over Europe
and left, for the most part, only women behind it, betrays all the
philosophical acuteness and original invention that we should
expect from the author of w The Hampdenshire Wonder " and
also a colour and poetry that have been lacking in his earlier books.

His picture of a deserted London will call to mind Mr. Wells'
" War of the Worlds," but even here Mr, Beresford has much that
is his own. That vast empty street with the mad " Queen of the
Earth " shining with stolen jewels, shouting as she goes, for its
only inhabitant, will not be easily forgotten by Mr. Beresford's
readers. But it is in his second part that his imagination is most
surely and emphatically original. His women— old Mrs. Gosling, the
two girls, Eileen, Elsie Durham and the rest — are so sharply
defined, and open up, in their relations to one another, so many
novel and thrilling developments, that the history of their adven-
tures is all too short.

Poor Mrs. Gosling is most triumphantly distinguished against
the bizarrerie and fantastic colour of the background. " No doubt
our 'Eavenly Father will make excuses " is her wavering resort to
some half- remembered security and, against the garlanded de-
bauchery of the Butcher of High Wycombe and the invasions of Pan
into a new relaxing civilisation, such security was badly needed,

" Goslings " is the most vital book that Mr. Beresford has
given us ; here then is Imagination, not, as with Mr, Locke,
discarded, nor, as with Miss Sidgwick, undisciplined, but honestly
developed and bravely restrained.

127

GENERAL LITERATURE By FRANK SWINNERTON

Gretton's Modern History, A Small Boy, Steps to Parnassus,
Lore of Proserpine, Dreams.

NO particular descriptive term has in general been for
years so commonly misunderstood as the word "de-
tachment." Writers dealing with the kind of fictional
art condemned as " realism " have always supposed
that " realism " meant something laboriously objective,
whereas " realism " (for which I am told writers to the
Westminster Gazette have been trying to find a more apologetic
name) is not necessarily either laborious or objective, once it is
properly mastered by the realist and his critics. English realism
does not set up a convention of not knowing anything about
subjective states : it is, on the contrary, primarily concerned with
a revolt against material things, by the extraordinarily simple
means of showing how they very evilly dominate the lives of the
majority of men. And it is ironic, and genuinely detached. Now
the reason it so clearly indicates its true succession to the older
school of English writers is that the detachment of English realism
is — not objectivity, but a very quiet, typically English, humorous
judgment. English realism, then, is intellectual to the extent that
it is based upon lucid judgment ; but its detachment is nothing
more nor less than the peculiar focussing power of this critical
humour, which makes it unheroical and, I hope, unsentimental,
but never insensitive. And it is not restricted to fiction, because
realism is an attitude of mind, and not simply a technical method.
Mr. Gretton, in his " Modern History of the English People,
1880-1910 " (Grant Richards, 2 vols., js. 6d. net each), of which
the second volume is now published, is witty rather than ironic,
because he is a serious and responsible annalist ; but his detach-
ment is entirely admirable. His book is not so much a history as a
gloss upon events, and it is sometimes a little difficult in the absence
of consecutive narrative to emulate Mr. Gretton's alertness in
springing from subject to subject. But, apart from that fact, and
the further fact that the extreme conciseness of the book demands

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General Literature

the assumption by Mr. Gretton of the reader's familiarity with
such things as the financial world and its vocabulary, the " follow-
on " rule, and the qualities of Harris tweed, the two volumes have
a clearness as well as a critical value and a humour of the highest
significance. The writing is wonderfully brief and efficient, avoid-
ing both baldness and overloading : the difficulty of compression
and selection has been overcome with immense gusto. The omission
of references to the Kinema has been noted elsewhere : I may
perhaps mention two other very slight points. " De Rougemont,"
I believe, was not a real name ; and the Daily Mirror was not
really started as a halfpenny photographic daily. It was intended
as a penny newspaper for " ladies," and adopted its present form
after a short run on its first lines.

Very different from Mr. Gretton's work, and from each other,
are the two books recently promulgated by distinguished novelists,
though both deal autobiographically with the early years of life.
Mr. Henry James, beginning with the idea that the public would
like to have early recollections of his brother, William James, has
been able to re-create with characteristic detachment the world
in which they both moved as boys. Not many of these pages deal
actually with W. J., but they are nevertheless a perfect delight, as
wonderful as pages from Mr. James's most wonderful novels,
and throwing off the same fascinating air of the understanding of
a unique order of life. It is a delight, especially, to catch in delicious
long miraculously-sustained and completed sentences, the very
real history of Mr. James's progress to comprehension of his own
" subtle " perception of things, which he styles a virtue and then,
against himself, admits a vice. How, from the time when an aunt
forbade her little girl to " make a scene," his mind began to see
everything in scenes and situations, to the time when he realised
that •* everything should represent something more than what
immediately and all too blankly met the eye," his progress to the
possession of the true power of observation and retention is here
disclosed. As the picture of a novelist in his earliest stages, " A

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Small Boy, and Others ■'* (Macmillan, 12s. net) is fascinating to the
lover of that novelist. As a beautiful picture in its own right, which
" glimmers at me as out of a thin golden haze, with all the charm,
for imagination and memory, of pressing pursuit rewarded, of
distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life in the grey, of the
wonder of consciousness in everything "—so impossible it is
better to express the impression of the book than in Mr. James's
own words — it is a supreme and delightful work of art, based upon
truth humorously observed, in the best English tradition. Mr.
James's detachment is nowhere illustrated more surely ; the
inexpressible candour of his primary perceptions, made difficult
for us only by the consummate analysis of their interplay, is here
once again revealed. Making observation the corner-stone of his
art, " pedestrian gaping having been in childhood," Mr. James
says, " prevailingly my line," embalmed, as it were, " in a sort of
fatalism of patience," he presently seems to define art as " dignity
and memory and measure," H conscience and proportion and taste,
not to mention strong sense too." And if that is the definition of
art, then surely Mr. James establishes his right for ever to be re-
garded as one of the most " artistic " artists who have ever lived.
Whatever may be his ultimate position among novelists, his in-
fluence upon novelists of the present day is probably greater than
that of any other writer of any time. It is impossible, that is to say,
not to learn from Mr. James — sometimes the peculiarity of his later
style, but inevitably something of the vital sense of truth that
pervades his books, however his later conventions may have
strayed from the clarity of " Roderick Hudson " and the exquisite
" Portrait of a Lady," Mr. James, like all other realists, has never
shrunk from the full exercise of his most fastidious perceptions.
For that virtue alone he deserves canonisation: hehas never preached;
but has always found the complexities and simplicities of life his
absorbing study. And if we would judge the almost ingenuous
manner of his sensitive approach to impressions, we are bound to
read " A Small Boy " with gratitude and affectionate delight.

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General Literature

Mr. J. C. Squire (" Steps to Parnassus," Latimer, 3s. 6d. net)
does not shrink from his perceptions ; but a parodist such as Mr.
Squire deserves something to parody. To ridicule the mediocre
is one of the most useless occupations in life ; and it is almost
intolerable to see a man of Mr. Squire's quite especial talent doing
wilfully what his victims fumblingly do in all good faith. So these
" Steps to Parnassus " are more by way of being cruelly humorous
imitations than parodies : in the case of Mr. Masefield, apart
from the sublime lapse into poetry, after Mr. Masefield 's own
manner, the fun is too boisterous and unlike to be amusing.
Elsewhere it is not really very edifying to have one's contempt for
the jejune roused by Mr. Squire's malicious pleasure in emulation.

Different indeed from any of the other books notable this month
is " Lore of Proserpine " (Macmillan, 5s. net), for it is by no means
humorous, or even very entertaining. " You will gather," says
Mr. Maurice Hewlett, " that I was a reader." Either that, or the
cult of fairies is but a sad one, for this jaded, unhappy, sterile
book is otherwise inexplicable. No grace is here, no tender delicate
participation in what we might assume to be the exquisiteness of
the fairy realm. Instead, we find fairies very prosaic little persons,
clad invariably in a single respectable garment (which, however,
seems not quite to suffice in cold weather to keep the owner warm);
and Mr. Hewlett is not at all moved to any lightness of touch.
After twice conducting us through the books which he (in common
with nearly every other boy) read in early years, he tells us about
the solemn little fairies he has seen, and repeats two long stories
— one of a fairy visitant and babe-stealer, the other of a fairy wife —
in which his own experience is not concerned. But in all these
stories, even in that of the Oreads in Wiltshire, there is a common-
placeness of imagining, no less than a hardness of relation, which
is really astonishing. It is as though Mr, Hewlett had determined to
put aside all his various mantles — such as those which yielded the
beautiful " Earthwork out of Tuscany," the incomparably rich
M Forest Lovers," the harsher novels of actual history, and the

*3*

The Blue Review

more recent experiments in modern romance—and show to our
unwilling gaze the secret reason why these splendidly costumed
works, each swaggering in a richly embroidered cloak of brilliant
phrases, never seemed, in all their dazzling wonder, to have truly
operative hearts. He has essayed realism, the writing of things
strongly seen and felt in a style of convincing simplicity ; and the
effect is one of a book which is neither lively (as we might surely
expect it to be) nor scientific. Mr. Hewlett would not have it
scientific : nor would we. But if he is to adopt recognised poetic
names, such as Queen Mab, and Oberon, and, presumably, the
fairy " common herd " (as he seems to do), he should also, I should
have supposed, make his accounts less laborious and more spirited,
in the manner of the poets from whom he borrows his nomencla-
ture. As it is, the fairies in " Lore of Proserpine " are simply
unpleasing and substantial creatures such as we may see at any
time in daylight without excitement, and if they are as dull as this,
there seems no actual virtue in acquaintance with them. Moreover,
the book has a horrible number of banalities, such as " Every one
of us lives in a guarded house ; door shut, windows curtained " ;
" We are bound — all of us— by our natures, bound by them and
bounded " ; and, worst of all, " The Forsaken Merman is a beau-
tiful poem, but not a safe guide to those who would relate the
ways of the spirits of the sea." Surely the book is a subject for
Mr. Squire !

Mr. Reginald Hine (" Dreams and the Way of Dreams," Dent,
5$. net) has produced a very agreeable miscellany of dreams, and
quotations from all sorts of authors, ancient and modern, and
exceedingly apt and humorous remarks of his own. The dreams
given are in some cases serious, and in others the strange chaotic
medleys that cause so much laughter at the breakfast table ; but
all are good. Mr. Hine writes from his own experience, and is so
far scientific ; and he has a tremendous familiarity with what has
been written upon the subject. He is a genuine believer in the value
and the truth of dreams and dreaming ; but he is no bigot. That

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General Literature

is to say, he is a humourist, and is therefore able to see himself
and his enthusiasm with detachment, even while, none the less,
believing firmly in what he has to say. Accordingly his book is
one to be enjoyed on quite other grounds than the mere discussion
of the author's case, which perhaps is less important than his very
nice dreams. But Mr. Hine is a good writer as well as a good
dreamer, and he has a mighty commonplace-book from which he
culls pleasant quotations.

Looking back over this chronicle, I hope I have not laboured
the word " detachment " too hard. I have found the quality in all
the books save one, and in that one I judge it to be absent because
humour is absent from the author's essential make-up. Mr. Hew-
lett's modern comedies are quite obviously based upon an
artificial convention rather than a truly ironic conception of life.
They make, indeed, hardly any pretence of representing life, and
must be judged by their own convention. But when Mr. Hewlett
brings his hobby into the open, and rides it with a prim solemnity,
it is surely permissible to call his book a dull book ? And it is dull
because he is too seriously intent upon it : he has the feeling of
being a seer. M I take leave to flatter myself," he says, " that my
own will be indispensable Prolegomena to any such work [a study
of the Preternatural], or to any research tending to its com-
pilation." That sentence offends me precisely because it reveals
absorption untempered by either poetic enthusiasm or true de-
tachment. One can't even be sure that it is true.

133

FRENCH BOOKS By JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

A Classical Revival

T|HERE are perhaps two reasons why the younger gene-
ration of French writers is given to collective intro-
spection and absorbed in speculation upon tendencies.
The first is the economic fact that one of the easiest
and least costly methods of procuring copy for a revue
jeune is to conduct an enquite ; the second is that for
better or worse the French logical mind is prone to develop a mania
for literary classification and a disregard for the essential character-
istics of the subject matter of the classification — literature. Con-
sequently, it is very difficult to derive any real information
from so extensive an inquiry as that of MM. Picard and Muller
(" Les Tendances Presentes de la Litterature Francaise." Basset,
3 fr. 50). Even if the classification into grandiose schools, Unani-
mistes, Paroxystes and the like, is admitted by the writers them-
selves, the labels tell us nothing, for they are concerned with the
accidents rather than the essentials of literature ; much as though
we decided to base our own literary criticism upon a division of
modern Poets into those who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast
and those who do not. Chaotic classification is a delusion and a
snare. More satisfactory, because more restricted and definite, is
the inquiry conducted by M. Emile Henriot in Le Temps (" A
Quoi revent les Jeunes Gens ? " Champion. 2 fr.) ; yet even here,
if we consider the replies as a whole, the result is negative.
The young French writers of to-day have completely broken with
Symbolism ; and if the contributors to M. Henriot's symposium
are unanimous in affirming that there is no " new school," they
are unanimous no less in denying the gods of the nineties.

The desire for novelty at all costs is no longer characteristic
of young French literature ; and the generation which expressed
this desire in vers libre and sought its models in America, in
Germany, m Flanders, in any country save France itself, is past.
It is true that any evolution from the artistic position taken up by
Mallarme was of itself doomed to sterility ; but other causes than

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French Books

a mere aesthetic impossibility have been at work. It would be diffi-
cult to overestimate the literary importance of the foundation of
the political organisation, L 'Action Franpaise, with its royalist and
Catholic programme and its watchword " France for the French."
The immediate cause of the Action Franpaise was the Dreyfus
trial, and though English opinion was practically unanimous in
supporting Dreyfus and condemning anti-Semitism, there can be
little doubt that on purely nationalist grounds the French agitation
against Dreyfus was justified. A French nationalist policy, such
as that adopted by the Action Franpaise demands that France
should remain a Catholic country and that its government should
not rest in the hands of naturalised Jews or other aliens. Although
it may seem that the growing popularity of such a party has no
immediate connection with the literary tendencies of modern
France, the connecting link is supplied by two individuals, Maurice
Barres and Charles Maurras . Catholic in their sympathies ,
nationalist in their politics, classical in their literary descent,
Maurice Barres as the creative artist, Charles Maurras as the critic,
enjoy an influence which becomes every day more widespread.
From Charles Maurras descends the most powerful of the younger
critical groups to-day, that of the Revue Critique, The political
programme of the Action Franpaise is translated into literary
terms. Alien influence must be excluded from French literature ;
a return to the truest French tradition, to Racine, Pascal, La-
fontaine, Stendhal, to Villon and to the Pleiade, must be exacted
by the new criticism. We have only to compare Charles Maurras*
latest book, " La Politique Religieuse " (Nouvelle Libraire Nation-
ale, 3 fr. 50), in which the Catholic anti-alien policy is argued
with the author's accustomed purity of style and language, with
" Les Disciplines," by M. Henri Clonard (Riviere, 3 fr. 50), the
chief critic of the Revue Critique, to see how close is the connection
between the classical renaissance in politics and in literature.
The authority of M. Maurras is quoted again and again in M.
Clouard's book ; the very sub -title, " La Necessite litter aire et

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The Blue Review

sociale d'une renaissance classique " reads like a phrase of the
master's. The burden of the argument is pure Maurras. Roman-
ticism must be forgotten, and the German prophets who preached
it rejected for the true French tradition. " An imagination,"
says M. Clouard, " can very well be happy and brilliant, a point
of view picturesque, a sentiment beautiful. But if you substitute
them for analysis and experience where there are no other possible
intermediaries between man and reality, you are mistaken and
deceived on every hand." Analysis and experience — they are the
old characteristics of French classicism and the ideals of the
renaissance in France to-day.

It is symptomatic that a recent number of the Revue Critique
was entirely devoted to Stendhal, in whom the analytic genius
of French literature reached perhaps its highest development ;
while soon after Les Marches de Provence devoted a whole number
to the consideration of fantaisie et jantaisistes. The Fantaisistes
form a new school of French poets, with this striking difference
from the generality of schools, that they have no programme or
propaganda, no pseudo-philosophical theory of life on which to
wreck their poetry. " Fantasy " in the sense in which the Fan-
taisistes use it for their watchword is a quality of temperament
and not an aesthetic dogma ; it is the faculty of analysing experience
with an irony that verges on cynicism and an introspection that
verges on egotism. In short, " fantasy " has always been an
eminently French quality, in spite of the fact that its literary
expression has been borne down for centuries by foreign influences,
Spanish in the seventeenth century, English in the eighteenth, and
German in the nineteenth. The terrible irony of Villon, the titanic
imagination of Rabelais — these are the purely French products of
fantasy. Jules Laforgue was a genius of the same mould. To this
essentially French tradition many of the most significant of the
younger generation attach themselves, P. J, Toulet, Tristan
Dereme, Francis Carco, Jean-Marc Bernard, Jean Pellerin, to
name the most significant ; and to this tradition belong three

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French Books

slender books of poetry, " Le Poeme de la Pipe et de PEscargot,"
by Tristan Dereme, " Chansons Aigres-Douces," by Francis
Carco (Collection des Cinq), " Sub Tegmine Fagi," by Jean-
Marc Bernard (Editions du Temps Present, 3 fr. 50). The
title of M. Carco 's book applies to all three ; they are all bitter-
sweet. There is a delicate irony and a wonderful perfection
of form in all, and underneath there seems to lurk a profound
malaise. I am not here concerned to detach the individuality of
these three poets ; but rather to emphasise their common quality.
Here is poetry that is sure at least of its own ground, and sure of
its essentially French spirit. It is poetry that does not thrust a
theory of the universe into a lyric, nor disdain a perfection of form
which is the birth-right of French poetry. Though as yet the
Fantaisistes have no great body of work to their credit, they have
at least this recommendation to our serious consideration, that
they do not thunder before they have learned to speak, while
they have jettisoned the preposterous cargo of " -ismes " under
which young French poetry has laboured for twenty years. M.
Dereme has the secret of a real Poetry when he writes :

Ma vie en silence s'ecoule
C'est pour peu d'hommcs que j'ecris
Car si je chantais pour la foule
Je pousserais bien d'autres cris.

Des deux poings defiant les astres
Je clamerais a grand fracas
Et ferais crouler les pilastres
Et les balustres sur mes pas

* * * *

Et peut-etre dans mon vieil age
Pourrais-je voir sur mon perron
Un laurier bercer son feuillage
Mais a quoi bon ? mais a quoi bon ?

The Blue Review

There has lately been too much conscious " shaking fists at
the stars " in French poetry, and the time has come for a classical
revival after the anarchy and cosmopolitanism of recent years. A
classical revival does not involve denying the last century and a half.
Romanticism is in the French blood now as it is in ours. A classical
revival means putting things in their place. In the pregnant phrase
of M, J.-M. Bernard, Romanticism is but an element of literature ;
classicism is a principle.

RECENT FRENCH NOVELS By X. MARCEL BOULESTIN

IF it is true that the French Drama is at present in a state of
decadence or, at least, of stagnation, it is none the less true that
many French novels are now written that show not only remarkable
cleverness and wonderful display of technique, but also a broader
view of Life and a passionate interest in things of vital importance.

During the last decade most French writers wrote books
dealing only with love and adultere (or even adultere without love)
and their consequences, pleasant or unpleasant; but it seems now as
if a reaction had really begun. And it is a sign of the times that the
present year has seen the birth of such books as U Ordination, Cauet,
Vieille Histoire and La Colline inspiree. Moreover these are not ex-
ceptional instances, for three of the works with which I am now con-
cerned present the same characteristics : human interest, observation
of real life and emotional appeal outside the relation of the sexes.

Mme. Colette Willy's new book, UEnvers du Music-Hall
(Flammarion, 3 fr. 50), for instance, shows us the monde of the
lower French music-halls, from the hard-working, honest acrobat
to the chorus-girl of the up-to-date Revue, monde of which we
had already a glimpse in La Vagabonde. Only this time no psycho-
logical plot and delicate sentimentalith are there to distract our
attention from the sometimes depressing realities of that special
kind of stage life. Colette Willy can see and she can describe, and

138

Recent French Novels

through the medium of her talent, we can see them too, those
artists of the music-halls, " off " without their make-up, their
graceful gestures and their fine clothes— as they really are. These
sketches are sometimes very amusing, often very pathetic, and
always admirably done. For Colette Willy has a sharp and fresh
vision and that wonderful gift which is typical of great French
writers, for describing a thing in a few decisive lines, for dis-
covering the right and sometimes unexpected adjective, for
pointing out the one essential and exceptional detail in a character
— where lesser writers would write pages of dull, obvious and
almost meaningless disquisitions.

But UEnvers du Music-Hail does not only possess literary
qualities : perfection of form and a sympathetic understanding of
certain conditions of life contrive to make this book a most
valuable contribution to the literature of the stage.

It is also of theatrical life that M. Charles Henrv Hirsch writes
in his last novel, and we also find in Saint-V oilier (Fasquelle, 3 fr.
50) the same qualities of emotion and pity. Saint-V oilier is the
lamentable story of a starving old actor who has probably never
known better davs than those minutely described in these three
hundred and fifty pages. He certainly never had talent, but illusions
and self-confidence helped him to believe in his genius which,
thought he, only bad luck and jealousy have prevented from
astonishing Paris. He sees the world through the veil of dramatic
literature and to him (until the very end of his miserable days)
life is only a pretext for splendid theatrical effects ; yet that is
because he is so much in earnest and so full of enthusiasm for his
art and his would-be glory.

It is in one of these small provincial towns in which Saint-
Vallier once played small parts that is laid the scene of M. Henry
Bordeaux's novel. La Maison (Plon-Nourrit, 3 fr. 50) belongs to
that class of grey, rather dull and indifferently written books
which, for some mysterious reason, always seem to reach twenty
or thirty editions. Of course, it is clever, but oh ! so aggressively

J 39

The Blue Review

catholic, patriotic (in the narrowest sense of the word) and bien
pensant. Such people as the heroes of La Maison no doubt exist
in large quantities, but their story is the rather uninteresting story
of many French families, and the banalites of life are apt to become
tedious unless treated by a Balzac, a Flaubert or an Anatole France.
The characters of M. Henry Bordeaux's ambitious book ought to be
satisfied with being readers — not heroes — -of novels.

Les Noces Folks (Bernard Grasset, 3fr. 50) is a love story pure
and simple, in which M. Eugene Montfort shows us first the
wonderful love affair, then the conflict between an Italian woman
and her Parisian husband. All that seemed in her divinely beautiful
against a background of romantic Napolitan scenery soon becomes
out of place in modern Paris. He falls in love with another woman
only to discover later—too late — when after a similar incident his
wife leaves him, that his love for her is as passionate as before.

As for Paroles devant la Vie (E. Figuiere, 3ft. 50) it is a remark-
able collection of strange comparisons, far-fetched adjectives,
invented words, lyrical sentences and second-hand metaphysical
ideas. I take it that M, Alexandre Mercereau is hailed as a genius
by many of his friends. It seems to me that he is specially clever at
discovering the obvious : he wonders at everything and everybody,
Life, Death, Maternity, The Poet, Pantheism, Himself and His
New Flat. Paroles, indeed, and not much else. His Paroles devant
la nouvelle demeure afford a typical example of his talent (including
a u sombre e'toffe londonienne " unknown to English decorators,
which shows his mania for using at any cost an unexpected epithet).
Miss Victoria Monks used to sing a song called (( Moving Day "
which was, I think, much more to the point.

140

MUSIC By W. DENIS BROWNE

Wolf-Ferrari, Hensche!, Fanelli

NE of our habits in England is to produce foreign
works with a flourish of trumpets a dozen years
|or so after their first appearance abroad ; by
[w T hich time their vitality is generally exhausted
and their novelty gone. It was really hardly
worth Mr. Fagge's while to disinter the " Vita
Nuova " for the sake of saying "first performance in England."
Wolf-Ferrari is not a great composer, and never will be : he
tries to graft German methods on to an Italian temperament, and
the result is confusion of style. The " Vita Nuova '' is really
nothing more than a student work. Regarded as a setting of a
poem that is as familiar to most Italians as the Lord's Prayer is to
us, it naturally loses much of its effect when sung to a translation :
and as it was done the other day all the intimacy of the original
vanished. Chorus and orchestra ploughed through it in strict
time without any of the rubato that the composer goes out of his
way to demand in a note at the beginning of the score. The
tendency of the music is naturally towards frequent accelerandos
and crescendos ; he has accordingly contented himself with purely
negative indications of diminuendo and ritenuto. Mr. Fagge's
Procrustean beat however never once allowed the music to play
itself, and the naive melodies and simple orchestration, which,
treated gently, would have been quite effective, sounded simply
stiff and affected.

Another semi-new arrival was Dr. Henschel's Requiem. It
was very well performed by the Handel Society. The soloists were
admirable and the chorus and orchestra— mainly amateur— quite
excellent. I mention the soloists first, because it is of them that
Dr. Henschel seems to have thought most when he was writing it.
The four solo parts melt into one another with delicious intricacy ;
if anything is to be said against the work, perhaps the writing is a
little too elaborate and consciously beautiful. The blending is not
so noticeable in the chorus- writing ; the joins here are sometimes

141

The Blue Review

perceptible and there are gaps just in the places where continuity
is most needed. There are besides far too many climaxes of sound :
they average about one to a page. But there is a great deal of beauty
everywhere, and sincerity too. Dr. Henschel writes strong and
musical counterpoint ; he has a vivid sense of tonality and that
power that Schubert had of momentarily disturbing harmonies
without shifting the key-centre ; above all he has the gift of writing
long tunes. He could not, of course, help being influenced by other
writers of requiems, but he has kept his own individuality in spite
of them. Mozart and Brahms can be traced in his mental attitude
towards the text, and Wagner in his musical treatment of it ; but
not one of them really obscures his personality in a single bar.

The performance of Fanelli's " Tableaux Symphoniques " by
the Colonne Orchestra of Paris was unsuccessful for much the same
reason as the " Vita Nuova," except that Fanelli was much more
in advance of his period (the eighties) than Wolf-Ferrari is or
ever could be in advance of his. M. Pierne's discovery has come
too late to do either us or Fanelli any good. There are a number
of curious anticipations of modern colour in the three pieces, but
they are too shapeless to be effective. There is undeniable atmo-
sphere in them all, particularly in the third piece, the insistence of
which becomes almost maddening after a time. Fanelli might have
been a great genius if he could have heard his compositions played
when he was younger : but years of privation and neglect have let
his ideas run to seed and left his technique sprawling.

Among the excitement of all these " discoveries " an unosten-
tatious revival has been quietly going on elsewhere. The Carl
Rosa Company have been performing Mozart's " Magic Flute "
in English at the Coronet Theatre. It was a modest performance,
but none the less interesting for that ; and is likely to do the cause
of opera far more real good than sixty Covent Gardens. But I
suppose the latter institution will go on thrusting Ricordi operas
and rubbish like " Oberst Chabert " down our throats until the
Day of Judgment.

142-

THE GALLERIES

Mr. Max Beerbohm's Exhibition By EDWARD MARSH

MR. BEERBOHM continues to keep us amused. His
" Garland " was the principal boon and blessing of
last Christmas ; and now people are four deep
round his little roomful of caricatures, and to see
them at all one must take one's place in a queue
like a first-nighter at the mouth of the pit.
No one in England, except Rossetti, has reached such mastery
in the two arts of pen and pencil ; (and even this compliment
must be strengthened if we are to believe Mr. Chesterton, who
has just told us surprisingly that Rossetti was only successful in
both because he was not very good at either). This is the more
remarkable because his method of parody and his method of
caricature are so distinct. His parodies are written from within.
He seems to possess his victims like the imp of some severely
logical nightmare, guiding them into strangely familiar surround-
ings, in which they remain themselves, only more so. He gets
into their skins like a refined Sally Beauchamp, and jerks them
into odd characteristic attitudes. He is a hypnotist, who shows us
his subjects politely and cheerfully drinking methylated spirit in
the belief that it is ice-cream-soda. Roughly speaking, no " Max "

disengages himself : we have only Messrs. ■■■- , — — , and ■ ■ ■ ■----,

in their habits as we know them, but a little off the rails. In his
caricatures, on the other hand, he is entirely the outside observer
and critic. There is far more exaggeration and distortion ; and
though there is equal subtlety, it is shown rather in choosing a
point of departure than in keeping up a perfidiously faithful
companionship. And everywhere we are conscious of Max — a
grave, ironic, penetrating, Olympian sprite.

The exaggeration and distortion are now less pronounced than
they were in much of his earlier work. His figures might still be
described in the words of Mr. Rupert Brooke :

*■' Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed,
Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost

M3

The Blue Review

By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways
From sanity and from wholeness and from grace."
But he seems to be gradually abandoning the almost purely
" constructive designs " of which the " Lord Burnham " and the
" Mr. Teixeira de Mattos " are the chief examples here. Perhaps
he is leaving them to the Futurists ; but, for whatever reason, his
personages are steadily becoming more human. This is of advantage
to his work in one of its aspects. There can be no doubt that he
will be among the chief sources for the intellectual and political
history of our time. Perhaps, by the way, he is also one of its
makers ; it is difficult to suppose that No. 16 will not be " another
nail in the coffin of Tariff Reform," or that after seeing No. 3
Mr. Arnold Bennett will not be shamed into finishing the Clay-
hanger series. But be that as it may, it is to be hoped that when
Mr. Beerbohm's work is completed, it will be made the foundation
of an " Illustrated History of England " for his period, which then
— thanks to his unfailing eye for the centre of a situation, and his
gift for fixing it in a memorably comic form — will live with in-
comparable vividness in the minds of a delighted posterity.

From this point of view it is a misfortune that among so many
brilliant successes he has a certain number of notable failures in
likeness. Lord Curzon, for instance, Lord Milner, Mr. Anthony
Hope, Mr. Albert Rothenstein, and Sir Edgar Speyer, are surely
almost unrecognisable. A plea may be put in for the Prime
Minister's nose ; Mr. Lloyd George seems to have got mixed up
with Mr. Keir Hardie ; and, worst of all, Sir Edward Grey, in
the embrace of the Russian bear, suggests rather Mr. Donald
Tovey struggling to escape from the influence of Stravinsky.

But what are these among so many ? and even if there were
fewer successes with individuals to set against them, there would
remain the types. Here are three groups which are miracles of
various invention at work on the results of observation : the
Colonels at the Cavalry Club, the Dons at Magdalen, and the
Labour Members fascinated by Lord Alexander Thynne ; and

144

The Galleries

the group of great ladies listening to Mr. Percy Grainger, though
less individualised, is an equally wonderful ensemble. Mr.
Beerbohm's vision of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is a more transcendental example of his fine historic sense.

He has among his invaluable qualifications for this role of
historian a sense of proportion and an instinct for greatness. He
may be occasionally unkind to mediocrities ; but never in his
wildest farce does he fail to pay some tribute, however mixed, to
a big quality in a man. Take the sublime absurdity of his Mr.
Balfour, clasping the " curves of his gradual violin " while he
elegantly applauds Mr. Bonar Law dinning on the big drum.
Take the tortuous, warped power of his " Lord Hugh Cecil."
Take the li Gabriele d'Annunzio," with the fire of genius and
poetry smouldering through the sensual vulgarity of the rasta-
quouere. Perhaps the finest example is the " Mr. John Masefield,"
towering like Gulliver, in his fastidious melancholy sympathy,
over the roofs of the slum, from the lips of whose denizens he is
so gravely noting down swear- words for future use. This is Mr.
Beerbohm's strength as an apologist (conscious or unconscious),
that in the act of giving his man away with both hands, making
every point against him, and surrendering all his weak places to
the Comic Spirit, he yet leaves him a great creature.

His technical equipment is a curious mixture. There is, of
course, a negligible sense in which he is no draughtsman. He
does not, perhaps cannot, and probably does not care to make his
figures stand on their feet or sit in their chairs ; yet he is a master
of expressive line. Sometimes his composition seems haphazard :
sometimes every touch falls into its place in a monumental design.
Sometimes his colour is neither here nor there ; but occasionally,
as in the buffs and crimsons of the *' Count Boni de Castellan e "
it flowers into such a harmony that one almost overlooks the
comic quality of the drawing.

A word must be said of the perfect style of his titles and legends
— the little imperishable niggles at the bottom of the pictures.

H5

The Blue Review

" Amurath and Amurazzle," for Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bonar Law,

is perhaps the wittiest where all are witty. But wherever there is a
tone to be caught, Mr. Beerbohm catches it and fixes it in a sen-
tence ; as in the words from a Nobleman's Memoirs, which the
Industrious Anonyma, a gaunt bespectacled spinster, is dictating,
in the most purely and deliciously ludicrous of the drawings, to a
slightly bewildered typist : " / saw a good lot of the Prince of Wales
— afterwards Edward VII.— in those days, and I must say that a
better sportsman — and, I may add, a better pal— never stepped in
shoe-leather. I remember once after I had been having rather a rotten
day at Newmarket he came up to me and, slapping me on the back,
said, etc., etc."

Independants and the Cubist Muddle By O. RAYMOND DREY

THIS year's Salon des Independants, in so far as it counts at all,
is a " Cubist " Salon. In an exhibition which stretches nearly to
the horizon, where anyone may send his pictures without fear of
rejection, for there is no jury, and where apparently everyone
does, the critic may reasonably hope to meet with adventures.
Somewhere amid the jostle of fashionable, glossy efficiency and
crude or glossy incompetence he may light haphazard on a lure
beckoning to unknown delights. Somewhere in the ruck may be
the choice encounter of a lifetime.

For lack of such rare stimulus (perhaps my persistence in the
teeming rooms was not equal to my opportunity) I am forced to the
consideration of the word " Cubism." It is a slushy term enough
as it is used to-day. Probably it was never very finely intentioned.
The public clamours for a name, and painters or writers think
they have to find one. This labelling is always the price that
artists have to pay for recognition, whether they seek it or not. The
public likes a school because it finds certainty in numbers ; there is
no comfort in the lonely man who paints without a name.

146

Independants and the Cubist Muddle

It is all very well to call certain painters " Cubists " if you are
content not to think any more about them after you have agreed
on the title. Of course the majority of cultivated people who walk
out of picture galleries to talk about art are quite content. Simpler
people, on the other hand, who walk into picture galleries to enjoy
the sight of pictures are either driven away abashed by the name
they know they cannot understand, worried into hostility to the
artists, or set humbly to the solving of insoluble riddles.

When a number of painters were labelled " Impressionists "
less harm was done. " Impressionism " is an abstract term : it is
tolerably elastic. The " Glasgow School " had some connection
with Glasgow. " Pre-Raphaelitism," silly term though it was,
certainly implied reaction. And " Post-Impressionism," with a
little licence, is a matter of dates ; whoever chooses may think so,
at any rate.

But what does this title <( Cubism " mean, which we hear
applied so indiscriminately alike to Picasso or Braque and Le
Fauconnier ; to Metzinger or Gleizes and to Delaunay (" Orphist"
will not stick to him long) ; to Marchand or de la Fresnaye and to
L'Hote ; to Picart-LeDoux and to Herbin ? I might add more
contrasting names to my list, but there is no need.

Are we to say that a " Cubist " is a man who paints in cubes ?
A technical similarity in the means used by all these men at one
time or another to express the volume of objects by outlining their
planes is a poor excuse for a frivolously superficial definition.
When the question is asked what these painters are expressing or
trying to express it will be found that no general designation will
fit them all ; that if definitions or titles are wanted the painters
will have to be taken separately or in groups of twos and threes,
with a title for each individual or little group. Such refinement of
definition would only make confusion worse confounded.

But rigid definition apart, some sort of philosophic division is
necessary if " Cubist " work is to be understood at all. I would
consider all the " Cubist " exhibitors in the Independants in

HI

The Blue Review

relation to Picasso, who has no pictures in the Salon, but who is, to
my mind, the one man who, sacrificing all thought of representa-
tion, of actuality, has achieved a real intensity of expression and
found a new way to our emotions, to our capacity for response.
One's personal relation to a picture is, after all, the only standard
of criticism that has any value. In other words, there are as many
standards of criticism as there are critics.

Picasso, then, has come from contemplation of form and sub-
stance to an abstract rhythmic statement that is new in paint but
old in music. Rhythmic statement is not new in paint. Rhythmic
statement independent of concrete representation, abstract
rhythmic statement, is. The difficulty that most people find with
Picasso is due to this : that never before has painting appealed
directly to the emotions without enlisting the aid of the intellect.
People complain when music becomes representative, realistic. It
is no longer music, we are told. Yet who can say what music is, or
what is painting ? It is a poor game to try to confine the human
spirit, to temper creation, to put our own blinkers on the visionary.

The " Cubists " in the Salon des Independants are all, by vari-
ous means, concerned with seizing and interpreting actuality :
space, the play of light on surfaces, the interplay of colour, signi-
ficant movement. Their failure or success depends both on the
measure of intensity with which they are able to invest the new
and arbitrary life on their canvasses, and on the quality of that
intensity. In the work of M. Gleizes and M. Metzinger, well
patterned though it is, I cannot perceive that life has become a
fuller thing through paint. M, Delaunay's big picture " L'Equipe
de Cardiff F.C." embodies everything which I have credited these
" Cubists " with seeking. It is intense, but the intensity is that
of Severini's " Cafe Monico." It is perfectly realistic, flooded
with light and air and dancing with movement. The photograph
is the lowest denominator of human vision. M. Delaunay seems to
have perfected the camera. Well, it takes a clever man to do that !

148

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